Unemployed, no jobs in her area, and nothing to lose. The young girl withdrew all her money (a measly five thousand dollars) and closed out all of her accounts.

            She spent all her money on high-end camping gear from the nearby stores; backpacks, skeins for water, cooking utensils, high quality tents for all seasons, and a sleeping bag or two.

            Having lived near a vast, never-ending forest all her life, and only ever having heard stories from hunters of what to not do, armed with nothing but a knife, a machete, an axe, and a pair of swords she inherited from her grandfather when she was little, she disappeared off the face of the earth.

            Utilities were turned off, the lease agreement for the studio apartment ended, friends went uncontacted, though it wasn’t like any of them tried to keep in touch anyway; what blood-related family she still had never bothered her. It was as if she never existed in the first place; she made sure of that.

            “Well, I just hope all my research and reading is enough to guide me long enough to survive, if only for a few days.” She said out loud to nobody, as she walked along a well-worn trail in the forest, the greenery and animal noises a welcome change from the hustle and bustle of the city she left behind.

            Some hours later, she found a quiet clearing, down an unworn branch of the path she’d been walking on, and had set up her tents and got a firepit of sorts built, ready to cook. She went foraging for mushrooms and other edible foods, not yet wanting to resort to hunting the deer in the area, but caught a couple rabbits, too.

            It was in this manner that a couple weeks had passed, and she had done more than she expected. Her expectations had been that of pure survival, but out here, in this land where nobody goes, she had been thriving. The wildlife got used to her presence, and some even came straight up to her to sniff, and graze. Winter was a way’s off, and she decided being out in the forest, away from the eyes of society, clothes were highly unnecessary.

            She would hum to herself as she trekked through the forest, making mental maps of where to and where not to go, finding new places each time. Her wariness was always high, as she knew from her research and hearing hunters talk about how aggressive some animals were likely to be strictly because she was trespassing on their territory, and she understood why! She’d turned that clearing into ‘her territory,’ after all, and she wouldn’t want some random creature to threaten her within it.

            In this way, a month, two, then three and four, had passed, and by this point, she had ‘lost’ her voice; she had nobody to talk to and, quite frankly, no reason to talk out loud to herself, so the sounds called ‘words’ started slowly fading away from her memory, to make room for the sounds the animals around her used. She began by conversing with the birds in the morning, though she was never entirely sure what was being ‘said.’