“You belong to me.”
The voice comes from behind me, soft and close. I try to turn around but I cannot move. I know this feeling. I am dreaming, but knowing that does not help. The voice comes again, louder this time. “You belong to me.” Again. “You belong to me.” It gets closer with each word, until I can feel warm breath against the back of my neck. I start to cry. Not because the voice is cruel. Because some part of me believes it.
I wake up.
The cave air is cold on my skin. My body is tight and wet with sweat. I lie still for a moment, eyes on the stone ceiling, heart beating fast. The dream always leaves me with the same feeling. Like something outside me already decided what I am.
I know what I have to do next. I have to look at the wall.
I turn slowly. There, through the small gap in the southern stones, the red eyes are watching me. Bright. Still. Waiting. They are always there in the morning, as if the beast also dreamed of me and woke up angry. We stare at each other and my body goes cold.
The anger I see in its eyes is the same thing I carry inside me. I just call mine fear.
I wonder, not for the first time, which one of us is the prisoner.
I look away from the eyes and think about the morning I left. I did not feel anything. I did not look back at the house. I just walked into the forest and felt, for the first time in my life, like I could breathe.
I felt free for about half a day.
I heard the beast before I saw it. Something heavy moving fast through the dark bushes, snapping branches, breathing loud. I ran without thinking. It chased me. Not like an animal hunting food, but like something that had been waiting for me specifically. I could hear the rage in it. I ran until my legs gave out, until I found a thin crack in the mountain rock and threw myself through it, scraping my arms, barely fitting.
Inside the cave, I pressed myself against the wall and tried not to make a sound.
The beast did not follow. But a moment later I saw its eyes appear at the gap. Low, red, burning with a fury that seemed almost personal. It stared at me for a long time. Then it left.
I told myself it would not come back.
It always came back.
The first weeks were the hardest. I was cold, hungry, and certain that I would die in that cave. I ate whatever I could find. Lizards that moved slow in the cold, insects, bats that I learned to catch in the dark by sound alone. I drank water that dripped down the walls. I slept on stone. I talked to myself to remember what my own voice sounded like.
But I did not die. I got used to it. That was almost worse.
Months passed. The beast came and went, always returning to stare through the gap for a while before disappearing again. I started to study it the way it studied me. I noticed it came more often when I moved near the entrance. I noticed it never tried to break through the wall, only watched. I started to wonder if it was afraid of the cave, or of the dark inside it. And if that made us more similar than I wanted to admit.
After about a year, I made my plan.
I waited one morning for the beast to appear at the gap, stare at me its usual time, and leave. Then I moved fast, straight toward the crack where I had first entered. My escape. My way back to the forest, to the world, to everything I had walked away from.
I stopped when I reached it.
I put my hands on the edges of the crack and felt the stone. The gap was exactly the same as it had always been. But I was not. My shoulders were wider now. My chest. I pressed myself against the opening and pushed, the way I had pushed when I was seventeen and desperate and small enough to fit.
I did not fit.
I stood there for a long time with my hands on the cold stone. Somewhere behind me, I could feel the red eyes returning to the gap.
I had spent a year growing strong enough to survive, and in doing so I had grown too large to leave.
That was few years ago.
Now I sit here every morning and meet the beast’s eyes across the cave. I have stopped being afraid of it the way I was at first. Something has shifted between us. Not friendship, not peace, but a kind of recognition. The beast keeps coming back. So do I. Neither of us has found a way to be free of the other.
Some mornings I think the voice in my dream is the beast. Some mornings I think it is the cave. Some mornings I think it is just the part of me that was always afraid. The part my parents built their quiet rules around. The part that ran into the forest to escape and ended up here.
You belong to me.
Maybe the dream is not a threat. Maybe it is just the truth, and I have not yet decided if that is something I can live with or something I still need to fight.
I look into the red eyes. They look back.
One of us will have to m…