The Woods

The last time I saw him he was dropping me off at the airport in Austin. I was crying but didn’t want him to see. The car idled in the passenger drop-off lane, and though we weren’t supposed to linger, we did. I had my back turned to him. Of course he knew I was crying. I was sniffling and wiping hot tears from my face. He reached out to me and said gently, “Hey…hey. Turn around.” I snorted a laugh, turned around, and sang the opening lines of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” We spent lots of time on that trip singing dramatic radio rock remembering decades past. He laughed with me, added his Adam Sandler version to the song, and pulled me in close for a final hug. I pressed my cheek to his chest and breathed him in, missing him already.

I had known Steve all my life. He was my brother’s childhood best friend, my high school boyfriend’s close bro, and a guy I adored since…well, since forever. He was sarcastic and raw, passionate about things that pissed him off, a lover through and through with a confident laugh, and sly smile.

I hadn’t seen him in years leading up to that romance, fifteen years or more, but we became close in ways that time and distance have no trouble bridging and fell in love in the extended and comforting hands of our shared history. We reminisced on old stories, but it was the chapters since we had seen each other where we really opened up – flaws and all – and allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, honest not only with each other, but also with ourselves for the first time. There was a sense of urgency in our time, both of us knowing it’s shorter than we ever expect, and beyond that time, just around the corner, the worms wait patiently for us – his imagery, not mine.

Just that day, on the way to the airport, he showed me his wrists, slashed through with white scarring, an attempted suicide not because he was sad, but because he was in a rage and had visions of murdering a man – no more than a boy really it sounded from his descriptions: some hipster fuckboi, skinny jeans and all, who worked at the same restaurant as his estranged wife.

He had caught her in a lie. She said she was going to be home late from work that night and couldn’t have their two children, two boys ages nine and twelve, that night — a school night — because of it, so the boys were to spend the night with him. He had that sneaking suspicion of jealousy though, and once he got the boys to bed, he staked out his wife and watched as she emerged from the restaurant, not late like she said, but quite early, only 9:30, and not alone, but with a young, trendy cat, laughing and and happy in each other’s company. He didn’t approach them, but stayed at a distance, unbeknownst to them. He watched as they ducked into a bar down the block for after-work drinks. Sure she was sleeping with the guy, his imagination rampant on the details and other lies she surely had been telling him, he began down the dark, winding path of rage.

He could envision eviscerating this twig of a man with the knife he always carried, and with each slash of vengeance he pictured in his blackest of blue eyes, he alternately saw his boys tucked in bed, or laughing and loving him as their father. Neither image he could escape from, and so he found himself in the woods, pissed at his wife, hating the young guy she was with, and horrified of the man his children would know him to be if he murdered this man the way he wanted to. So, he turned the knife on himself and cried and screamed to the trees, and bled and bled and bled. But he didn’t die, and somewhere in the fog of pain and anger and guilt, he realized who really held his heart: his boys. He stripped his socks off, bound his wrists as best he could, and hauled his mentally-ill ass out of the forest and into a clinic.

As he reigned himself in, he saw not only himself as a father, but also his own father, a man who cared for his five children though not all of them were biologically his. He saw his mother grown up before she should have been, living a simultaneously hard and detached life, one that saw her mothering her four daughters and young son, but just as often not.

The car glided over the freeway toward the airport as he shared his hurt, and with each dwindling mile toward takeoff, my chest tightened, like it was collapsing under the weight of that dark forest he found himself in. I was desperate for him to stay away from those tangled trails where emotion overgrows thought and begged him to promise me he’d never turn on himself again. He solemnly swore that he wouldn’t, but I don’t know that I believe him. He enjoys his drink and smoke, and his drugs for that matter, legal and illegal alike. For all I know, he may be committing that long-view suicide on the daily. I also don’t know if he sees stories of strength rather than weaknesses written in scars across his skin. I hope he does.

I haven’t seen him since that afternoon curbside at the airport. After being with me, he went back to his wife briefly, then back to an angry drunk of an ex-girlfriend, someone broken like he’s been at times, but mostly functional and financially stable. A comfortable enough place to be for now.

I see his deep-set shadowy blue eyes sometimes in my own eyes, challenging my loneliness and life’s losses, inviting me into the woods with him. The woods, after all, was also where we spent our childhoods, hiding from each other, building forts to claim as our own, and fantasizing about our futures – what we would take and what we would give to the world. How easy it would be to slip away into the shadows and hide from old resentments and regrets that threaten to boil over onto those close by. Then I remember the pain and anger I felt when he told me what he did to himself. That’s pain enough for me. I remember the strength it must have taken him to pull it together and get out of the woods that night. That’s strength enough for me, too. I see an ease of love wash over my eyes, love like that of a parent, nurturing, patient, forgiving, and my eyes return to their usual clear gray green, the color of my father’s eyes, the compassion of my mother’s; then I pick up the phone to let him know I’m thinking of him.