Don’t come back to me different, I think, or else I do not want you at all.
I wait at the edge of the forest for him, reveling in the feel of standing at the beginning of something, before it swallows me whole. I look down at my feet and wonder if he’ll notice my shoes. Will he see my newness? The parts of me that I’ve fixed? Perhaps he will see me once again without the dents: the girl he knew at 15 that didn’t care about calories or the decimals after a number on a scale. Perhaps he will want me again.
We’ve been here only once before, when he sat in the chair across from me in a ninth-grade English class. It was there in that moment that the forest grew.
The thought of seeing him is frightening. I sink down to the twigs and the mud; I lie in the dirt. I can feel the twigs prickle me, their readiness to twine around me. One starts to circle my ankle, and I know that I must tell it to go.
He spent five years pining for me, before I ever realized that I wanted him. And then we spent four years together. He was the one that needed me.
You dropped me. Not finger by finger. You let go with your whole hand.
Did you think of me? What were you thinking? Did you worry about the way I’d hit the ground?
The pain. A never-ending fall. The ground. The ground. Please, the ground. I split in the air. A great chasm divides me. My life when I was with you sinks into it; please, go somewhere I can’t reach.
I had just put myself back together. You didn’t even take a moment to look. You gave up. Your slip. Not mine.
The ground.
I stand back up.
Chris comes to the forest, where we’ve decided to meet. He’s running. He barely stops once he’s reached the edge. He offers his hand out to me while he labors through a tight breath.
I go to take it: instinct, but for a moment I pause and look at it instead.
How many others have used that hand since I’ve been gone? It looks rotten, ruined.
“We must go,” he says, and then yanks me up. We run.
I trip behind him for a few minutes before I stub my toe on one of the trunks he dashes around. I yelp.
“Why are we running?” I ask.
His shoulders heave up but don’t come down, holding some load that is far too big for his body. Those used to be my shoulders, I think, before my twisted mind and I became too heavy.
“I’m only going to make it through here,” he whispers, “if I don’t look back.”
The forest thickens as we run, the height of the trees growing. It squeezes us together, tight.
And then, he lets go of my hand.
I am so starved of his affection, devastated by his release, that I forget to look forward at the monstrous tree that has grown before us.
There is nothing to do: He must go one way, and I must go the other. But instead of looking out for myself, I watch him. And then I fall. A terrible fall of knees and hands and face that all crumble together, until for a moment I am nothing but a piece of debris on the ground. There is so much pain that there is almost none.
I look up at him and know that all of me: my face, cheeks, filthy fingertips, and lips are now cracked—split and dried with blood. I am covered in the murk of shame, because it is I who caused this, I whose heavy thoughts have forced his love for me to darken.
But before he can pick me up, as he’s done before, I stand, trudge forward, and sprint. This time, I am beyond his sight before I yell for him.
“Why have you stopped? Are you not coming?”
His voice wraps around the trees, and then breaks when it touches my ears. “I never thought you’d get back up.”
I wait for him to walk towards me. The seconds are thick with my desperation. I try quite hard to be patient, to breathe, for I know that if I walk to him first, the possibilities of us will scatter.
“I shouldn’t have run,” he says, “but it was all I knew how to do.”
A branch inches out to me from a tree on my right. It shakes until I acknowledge it, handing Chris’ thoughts over in its thin fingers. They crumble and crunch in my palms: dry leaves.
I dropped you. You were so much to hold. You’re not repairable now. A chip in your side. A dent in your metal. And since those are there, you could break so easily. A drop. A splatter. A plummet. An end.
I wish that I could see you differently. Whole. The girl that I once knew. But I’m afraid I only see your damages now.
It’s possible that I’m as wrecked as you.
We stare at each other. I want to hug him because we used to be so close, and I should never have to be so far from him, but there is more than old love and a piece of dirty ground between us. The hurt spans a greater distance than I will ever be able to cross again and so we simply stand there. We are now nothing of what we once were.
“Can I show you something?” I ask. Because if there is anything left to say, it is this.
He nods. I wonder if he is out of words for me now—if they’ve slipped from his tongue to his fingertips, if he’s let them go and drag behind him, tethered to him now by an unraveling string.
I do not try to hold his hand.
The forest sinks down in ways that force all of the trees to lean. They make a circle, a crater, where the old us has fallen into. And in the hole the trees are different, tiny, aged only from our nine years together. They are charred and black.
“What have we done?” he says.
There is too much sorrow filling me to speak. If I had been different, cared about Chris and not the way I believed my stomach looked, or my legs, or my arms, the trees would have grown. If he had been different, explained to me how he was worn out by my disease, the forest may not have blackened.
We try to walk down the slope without falling, but gravity takes over and we both tumble in parallel descents. I suffocate each time my face rounds back into the dirt. I can hear the twigs slash and scrape at Chris, just like they are doing to me. A bad part of me is glad that he too is in pain. Not once do we crash. I was really hoping to crash.
Neither of us stands up. Instead, we sit with our crumpled limbs, looking at the dead trees.
“We can grow them again,” he says to me. “After some time, space from each other. We’ll let the ground fix itself, and then perhaps we will find each other again.”
But what he really means is that perhaps he’ll forget. Maybe one day he won’t remember me going to the bathroom every morning when we would wake, maybe one day he won’t see the way I clawed at my body, bit my arms out of self-loathing. Maybe one day he’ll forget how much he’s seen me hate myself, and in turn, forget how much he hates me.
The force of his potential absence in my life shoves back at me, with hands that look just like his. I love his hands so much that I want to reach out and grab them, claim them again as mine. But the hands are not for me; they are against me. Stop pushing so hard, I want to scream.
“You think it was my sickness that killed them?” I whisper.
“I…”
I stop him with a shaky hand. I have gotten rid of my disease: bundled it up and thrown it far enough that it will never find me again. But when I look back at Chris, the boy that I had so much love for, my greatest fear happens. He looks different. In those next few moments, I suffer a pain that is too vicious for my meek bones.
I get up without words. I take off.
By the time I get out of our hole, the earth has changed and slanted, sunk into a darkness that will keep even the best of eyes from finding the light.
To be able to see nothing in front of me is an agony that is almost sweet; I feel that I might just disappear, for nobody could possibly find their way out of such a dense forest.
Then, the pain consumes me. I cannot sense where my toes have gone or if the particles of me are dissipating into the air one by one.
I stop and sit. I cannot in this moment recall that the forest has an edge.
A voice seeps up through the ground and flutters over my knees before it moves up and sinks into the bruised part of my chest. It goes on, it says. Go on.
“I don’t want to,” I say.
The voice thumps in my chest: Go on.
Can’t. Ruins. Save me. Put me somewhere else. I want him so bad. No. Go on. No. I am remains.
I remain.
Days, weeks, seconds, strain on and stagger past me until watching them go becomes more awful than not moving with them.
I get up, and it is almost as if the Universe has taken note of what I’ve done: a sphere of light appears in front of me. The trees juggle the light, tossing it from branch to branch, from this tree to that one. The light is not enough to see into the distance, but it is enough for me to see my next step.
“Are you lost?” A voice says. I jump.
There is another boy beside me, someone else of my age, with shadows over his face. I shake my head. “Not lost, stuck.”
He chuckles and my stomach lifts. I inhale and realize that I have forgotten what it feels like to breathe air that isn’t full of spikes.
“I’ll walk with you out of here.” I can see his smile even through the darkness.
We walk beside each other and instead of splitting up to walk around the first tree that blocks our path, the boy pauses, reaches for my hand. He lifts my palm up to the trunk and motions for me to slide it along the wood as I step over the roots. He steps back, waits for me to make my way before he follows.
He does not go on the other side.
The forest is different on the way back; the trees have more of a color, and when I crane my neck up, despite my own height, they look small. I can’t decide if we’ve taken a different path, or if the whole world can be a stranger after a great and terrible fall.
I can see the boy’s face better once the trunks start to thin. He’s splattered with freckles: above his eyes, his nose, his lips. I try my best not to compare it to Chris’ face, because at times I worry that no others will ever do. But there’s something lovely here. There’s a trickle of excitement inside of me for something new.
He starts speaking about mathematical theories; the simplicity of the world through squares and circles. His eyes don’t notice my torn, bloody dress.
We make it back to the edge of the forest and suddenly there is light.
The boy holds his hand out for me. “Are you coming?” he asks.
But just as I’m about to answer I hear Chris’ heavy breaths. I turn. He’s there beside me. “Don’t go,” he says.
There is a great part of me that wishes the earth would open up and take me back into it.
Chris grabs my other hand. I’m not sure what to say to him, but I know that I can’t go back into the forest. My heart is splitting.
The ground. I’ve reached it. Parts of me still hurt, but I’m whole. A bruised elbow, scraped knees, a throbbing heart.
It’s gonna stop over time though.
I’m gonna find another you. This time someone on the ground.
It’s too hard living up there in the skies with you.
Let me know if you ever come down.
But as I begin to pull away, Chris reaches up, puts his hand on my chin, and glides his fingers along the bone of my cheek.
I laugh. “They all told me you would do this”
He pauses. “What?”
“Come back for me once I let you go.”
I’ve said something that has hurt him. I watch it slip from my tongue and land on his ears, barreling into his body like some kind of dark force that will destroy his insides as it falls through him.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He nods. “It was so hard to watch you. I didn’t think things were supposed to be hard. I got caught up in my mind, about us… ”
“And me.” I finish for him.
He nods again. “Yes.”
I hold his hand a bit tighter, before I let go. “We both killed all of those trees.”