The air is thin. The world is silent. There are no birds, no bugs, no noise. Just me and my friend, with our breathing being the only thing to pierce the deafening silence. Our path is decided by the mercy of the flashlight, and the battery that fuels it. Plastic bottles and rusty equipment litter the ground like roots, remnants and artifacts of the people who ventured here before us. If you haven’t figured it out already, we’re in a cave. It was his idea, he heard about it from his friend. A cave in the forest located just upwards from the school campus. Of course, we had nothing to do, so we decided to head on over and explore it. 

To even get to the cave we had to cross through the forest. Trees built a labyrinth like terrain, making us have to crawl our way through. We eventually came to a steep gulch with a metal rope allowing us to traverse down further. When we reached the bottom, before us was a cave as big as a building.

We turned on our flashlights and began to walk through. As we ventured further and further into the cave, our surroundings got more and more quiet. Soon, the only sounds we could hear were the sounds of us breathing and our feet touching the ground. The stone labyrinth we entered wasn’t linear, it went up and down and split off into different directions. We walked for what seemed like half an hour, though I can only assume it was really just 10 minutes. 

We stopped walking when my friend heard the sound of water, and panicked at the idea of rain. It was time to leave. As we hurried back, I had pocketed a medical ID I found on the ground, as well as a peculiar rock that piqued my interest. It wasn’t long until it started getting hard to breathe, a combination of the dust and the suffocating walls blocked a large amount of air off from my lungs. I was recording the entire escape, but as we approached the exit, I found a lone plant sprouting from the ground. It completely contrasted everything around it, bright green, brimming with hope in the desolate world it grew in. I took a picture, then continued walking.