Looking around to make sure no one saw us, I grew anxious out in the woods, the dark spreading but for the moon at the horizon, a great orange circle, and the stars peering through the canopy. 'Get up right now and stop laughing.'
You stretched out your hand, still laughing, still on your back as if nothing funnier had ever occurred.
'Not till you stop laughing.' I pulled my coat tight and thought about leaving you but I knew you would set fire to this place.
'Okay, okay,' through laughter, you pushed yourself to a sitting position and stretched a hand out for me again. 'Help me up.'
I sighed loud for you to hear and took your hand and pulled but you went limp. Your laughter rose and I threw your hand back at you.
'Okay, okay, I'm sorry, won't do it again, just give me your hand.'
We tried again and you pulled me on top of you. My screams beat against the trees and rose up to the clouds but there was no one to hear and your grip was strong, your laughter infuriating but you promised to let me go if I calmed so I did. Our faces inches apart, I thought you were going to kiss me and sometimes I wonder if the rest of your life would have been different had you simply had the courage back then to do what I know you regretted not doing for so many years. Now, I could not say if I would have kissed him then but life's different when young. If a person wanted to kiss, a kiss tended to happen.
I remained on top of him, neither of us speaking, my young breasts against your chest, our sexes aligned, and all the dark bathing us. The grass was cool and your eyes were halfmoons shrouded by my own fallen hair, the bangs of mine connected with yours, the black melting into the muddy blonde you always were except in pictures of your childhood. So long we laid there that our bodies fell into sync but we never even touched, not properly, not skin against skin, and I wonder if that small detail, even more than the kiss, was what set the rest in motion. Lovers touch skin but we never made it there. The musk of a late fall and the sting of gasoline in our nostrils. You asked me if I had a cigarette and I asked if you would let go.
We walked home chaining cigarettes but not talking, careful not to start ourselves on fire. At my door I told you to promise not to burn down the woods but all you said was your name, Marcel.
I thought about you that night staring out at the harvest moon and I know you stared, too, probably from your rooftop the way you always did. I didn't then, but I picture you now the way you must have been that night, your peacoat open, standing barefoot in the midnight chill watching that great big keeper of dreams turn into the morning light.
***
It wasn't so much that I didn't want him to start a fire that might alight the whole town but that those woods were my woods, or so I never stopped believing. My whole childhood till I left with him belonged to those trees. Besides, trees are good people and never do any harm, least not the kind that deserves that kind of death, asphyxiation, burning. I shudder to think of how many trees must die in that fashion. Far more preferable to be buzzsawed down leaving just an idle stump. If I was a tree, that's how I would want to go. But those woods, from the very beginning I spent my days in there. Pap was outdoorsy and never had a son so he substituted me for those many things that a man feels must be passed from him to another. Never was I my mother's child, always jeans, never dresses and bows, always grease and fires, not flowers and poesy. There is something about the bond between a father and daughter that cannot be matched by any other. That is why, I suppose, people get those issues, daddy ones, when their pa is a deadbeat or an asshole. I was lucky.
But the trees were more than just the playground of my youth and a place to be alone in adolescence. I never have told anyone about this but those trees are alive. Not just alive as in they exist and turn carbon dioxide to oxygen and go through photosynthesis and the seasonal cycle, but in the way that I am alive, in the way that a person exists. Most people never listen because most people never bother to separate from the noise of humanlife, but, if like me, many things can be heard and understood. I climbed trees and stayed in them for days only returning homeward to eat and sleep and reassure them who lived there that I still lived.
'My little Artemis,' my pap called me owing to how Artemis of legend was a friend of the spirits that lived in the trees. See, treespirits are notoriously cautious and shy but they befriended Artemis and shared with the goddess the many secrets of the forests of the world.
My pap never cut down a tree in all his life or so he said because to do so would bring misfortune on the fellow who felled the wood that housed a treespirit. He said that must be why they took to his daughter so. I owe many things to my father.
The woods were a safe haven for me then as well. The early years of public life was not easy on me. I was bullied and abused by the other girls because I didn't care about being pretty but I was small and thin, all bones then. All my friends turned on me when the pretty girls began to ridicule me and I spent my elementary and middle school years alone, friendless but for the trees and the spirits amongst them. In there I was a queen and I lived a life of magic and wonder. All those trees around, it was easy to forget, to erase the lonesomeness.
But, the real secret is not that the treespirits exist, but from where they came. If a person is inclined to believe in such, in spirits and demons and so on, said person tends to believe that these spirits are immortal, begot from some fantastical plane of existential consummation. In a sense, I suppose that isn't incorrect, but neither is it the truth. Treespirits, at least these that lived in the wood, they came from the very city we inhabited. It took some of them centuries to find their way home and lived in that area far before the settlers who founded it arrived, while others navigated after death better and found a home where they once lived to watch over their loved ones, and the offspring of the ones they loved. They told me to watch the stars, that when one burned bright it meant that a spirit had found its home, and when one appeared that was not there before it meant that a new spirit was born, which is another way, an optimistic fashion, of saying a body ceased to live and the spirit passed on.
Nothing ever really leaves the world is what I discovered.
Another reason why I didn't want him, Marcel, to burn the woods down was because of the plague that would fall upon him for it. When I told him this later he laughed till he saw my face.
'You serious?'
'There would be no escape for you.'
'Maybe I did set it on fire.'
'But you didn't.'
'But the plague is real and cast over my very days.'
Had he taken my hand then like he wanted to we may have found a way.
***
We often had talks like that, you and I, remember? I sometimes wondered then if you meant it all, if what you said was believed by the you that spoke. At the time, it wasn't easy. You never made it easy, even when I wanted to. Even when I thought I could give to you what you always wanted, you ran from me and I chased after until you collapsed again, the gasoline everywhere, but, every time after the first, you burnt us. You engulfed me, too, your maddening inferno that spread to everything you touched.
I wanted to love you.
***
When we drove we drove far with the windows down and the music loud and cigarettes burning. You always smiled then, that first summer we spent together, inseparable. In all my life with you, those months were the most perfect. Free from anxiety, from thoughts of the future, from what it meant, from meaning at all. The obsessions of a meaningful life didn't weigh you down or drown you yet so we flew then free like lovers even though our skin still never touched and never were we yet as intimate as that first night beneath the glowing moon.
You sang often then, singing loud, your body weaving with the melody behind the steering wheel. One hand passing cigarette from your teeth to the window while the other guided us forever in all directions, your face bombastic and blissful.
You once told me to remember you as a time of day, do you remember?
If I
had to, it would have to be the witching hour. All those nights we spent in parks under the streetlights and the stars drinking cheap whiskey stolen from my parents, trying our hardest to forget the best nights of our lives. I never told you but I remember every word you said all those nights. All those times you talked of the heavens, of the hells, of the trepidations, of the hopes, I remember. Never did I admit when you pressed because you were different then, no longer that sweet brooding man who was halfmad and lovefull, but I do. There was a night you swung upside down serenading me in that falsetto you did because you said you couldn't sing but I loved your voice. I hear it sometimes when I'm alone in the woods I grew up in, the ones I missed while you lived.
But, rather than a time of day, I remember you as a time of year, and every summer, even still, even when you were still there with me but no longer the man I knew, I still longed for that summer and it made me lonesome even to have you around. Somehow I lost you to yourself and maybe I am to blame.
Sometimes I fear that I am.
***
I returned here. I belong here. To these woods. He took me away from here because he thought if I didn't belong to the woods then I would belong to him. For all of his intelligence, and he was the brightest man I ever met, brilliant in that wild way that only geniuses are, he never understood the way life worked, the way romance and love happened. From reading the many things he wrote, I thought that he must. No one could say these things without knowing, but, in the flesh, he was lost to the real world.
'It only makes sense up here,' he knocked knuckles on the side of his head, his other hand fiddling with rope. 'The whole world fits inside my head at night and I tease it all apart, pull strands to examine the way this exists or that, but when I get out here with the light on, there're so many people and I get lost in faces that I can't remember, that I never imagined, and the whole of existence begins to slip through my fingers, unravelling at an alarming rate until all I have are a bunch of threads and a cracked snowglobe leaking that water that isn't water. And, because there's nothing to do about it, I shrug and let it fall, the threads blown by the breeze, the snowglobe shattered.'
The whole time you spoke, you twisted the rope into knots, tying and untying, tightening and loosening. Your eyes were cool fogs, 'The world in my head, the one I create, the one I keep on imagining, it makes sense. All this stuff out here,' you waved your hand, 'even you, it's all lost on me.'
Keep looking at me, I thought then. Just keep your eyes on mine and I'll figure it out.
But you didn't. Of course you didn't. You rolled back and put your arms behind your head staring into the sky. I placed my head on the edge of your arm but you didn't pull me close or move into me. You left me there on the edge.
***
After that first day, I woke up to you outside my front door waiting for me. My pap was talking to you. My pap was not a gentle man and was very protective of me. I never had another man in those years of youth that my pap liked, but he took to you. I came down and you two were laughing. What about, I don't remember.
'Vir, where'd this one come from?' My pap placed his big paw on your shoulder smiling, eyes the color of the sky, wide and bright.
'Uh,' my arms wrapped round me, barefooted, lifting each foot, alternating from left to right and back, 'the woods.'
He laughed that deep sonorous laugh from his stomach, 'Of course he did!' He slapped your back and pushed me towards you and went inside telling us to have fun.
***
For years he asked about you and wondered why we weren't married.
'We're not even dating.'
His face went serious, 'Still? You don't get ones like him often. Get back together with him.'
'We never dated.'
'You still saying that? He'll treat you right, Vir. He'll treat you the way you deserve.'
***
'What are you doing here?' I leaned my head to one side and pulled the hair behind my ear.
You looked around, hands shoved deep in pockets, shoulders high, you somehow lifted them higher while you raised both eyebrows, 'Came to see you.'
I stared at my feet, hiding my smile.
'Hey, come on,' you tossed your head back.
'Where?'
You shrugged again, eyebrows, too, 'Who cares?'
My hands were in the sleeves of my long teeshirt and I grabbed some hair, pulled it over my mouth, hiding the smile but you knew, 'Let me get dressed.' I turned and ran inside. You were the first boy to show up like that and I didn't even know you. I was only sixteen, maybe less, yet I knew that I would never meet another like you, no matter how long I lived.
When I came downstairs you were sitting with my parents, my mother beaming, her cheeks rosy the way they get when she was beside herself with joy. She thought I would have to be a girl from then on. And I was. I think I became one that day.
Outside I asked where we were going.
'Your dad says you like the woods.'
I nodded, smiling.
'Wanna go there?' You pushed me playful like with your elbow.
'Uh huh.' My face flushed and I felt stupid for speaking like that, uh huh instead of yes or sure or yeah, but you smiled back and told me to come on. When we were out of range of windows and neighbors you lit two cigarettes and handed me one. My hands were iced claws but I smoked it because, I think, it was from you. You who I didn't even know, you who showed up at my house only hours after learning your name, only hours after stopping you from committing the greatest crime of your guilty life, you who spoke with my parents like old friends. Before I remembered to remember this time with you, we were amidst the trees that spoke to me.
I grabbed your arm, 'Come on.' And we ran. I lied then because I had no direction, but I needed you to chase me.
We came upon the dying stream that trickled water only just but left the soil thick and soft with mud. I stopped but you didn't, jumping over, then walking back through and offering your back. I laughed, your face peeking over shoulder, and climbed on, your hands high on my thighs, my arms around your neck. You never knew this but I smelt you, almost put my nose right up to your hair. You smelt like days old clothes, like stale smoke, and staler beer. I stopped watching where we went because you never put me down, even when we passed the stream, and put my cheek to your back, the soft wool of that stupid peacoat found in a neighbor's garage that you never grew into. The sound of the woods, to me, fell away beneath the crunch of leaves and your breath. You stopped to light two more cigarettes and passed one to me on your back.
'Should I get off.'
'No, you're fine.'
'I'm too heavy.'
'Lighter than air.'
You shrugged me up higher on your back, my squeal releasing that girlish laughter from your lips.
Lying in the leaves making leaf angels, later you told me that was the moment you fell in love with me.
'The way you smiled only for me and tried to not meet my eyes. Your laughter and your perfect face.'
'Stop,' I covered my face with hair.
You pulled my hands away, cleared my face from hair, 'You're the most beautiful girl I have ever met.'
I threw my arms around you and smiled over your shoulder, my cheeks hurt when we let go.
***
You never thought I would remember this, did you? Not after all this time but I do. It was the most perfect time of my life. My entire future, the next thirty years, was set into motion because of those days with you from fall to summer and on into the following winter when life turned sour. But mostly it was those first months, that first year with you. That perfect year when we loved one another without shame, without thought. But never did we kiss or make love. I was fifteen and you sixteen, and I prefer to remember us like that always. You and I.
***
It didn't remain. Nothing ever stays the same, least of all the parts of life that involve him. He never held back the way a normal man does and held back in all the ways a normal man pushes forward.
He did everything fullforced except when it came to physical love. He hid from me when all he had to do was take me, was touch me.
***
The last time I saw him alive was many years after and even more ago. He was twenty nine and I was twenty eight still. I didn't know then it would be our last moment together. He was still going on about Sebastian Falke, still searching the country, the globe for even a word of his films. We were celebrating the publication of his first novel I Wish He Belonged to Me. This part isn't about his book, though.
His girlfriend Helena beside him, my husband Terry with me, and the many friends that he had made across the world all attended. I didn't know them and most the night was lonesome, the way many nights over the last decade had become with Marcel. Aloof and despondent with me but smiles and cheer with all else, appearing happy, and I believe he was.
The drunker he got, the more he danced, the more he sang, the more he flirted, and he flirted and danced with everyone, men and women. That was always his way, a magnificent tease, touching and feigning intimacy but never going beyond public spectacle, always pulling away when the other's lust became more than just a game.
He cornered me for what would be our last conversation but not the last I heard from him. The music too loud in the room and we shouted into one another's ears.
'You've not read my book, I know, though I, do you remember, I sent it to you years ago back when it was a different book,' his eyes glassed over and I knew the only memory of the night he would retain would be of me leaving, even before it entered my mind to run.
'You know, for all these years, all these mad poet words, they've been for you, Gina.'
'Don't call me that,' I touched my neck and backed from him into the wall.