Be Not Far from Me(35)

I just enjoy them.

They’re grazing in a small clearing, little nubs of teeth pulling up the new grass. They’ve still got their spots, dazzling white in the sun, contented tails flicking back and forth as they eat. Their mom lifts her head and spots me, falling still and silent. I do the same, waiting for her to snort and let her little ones know that there’s a predator nearby and it’s time to run.

She doesn’t.

That’s how I know I’m well and truly fucked.





Day Ten




My Baggies are empty and so is my stomach.

I didn’t bother with a shelter. Instead I crawled in under the low branches of a pine and slept with my fist punched up into my belly like somehow I could trick it into thinking it was full. It didn’t work, and I wake up with needles stuck into my skin at odd angles and a grumble in my gut that nothing but food is gonna fix.

It doesn’t hurt yet. I’ve probably got at least two days before I’ll be in pain again, so that’s something. I pull up some greens and chew on them, rolling them in my mouth same as the deer did the day before, thinking. I still haven’t moved out from under the pine when it starts to rain, low-hanging branches keeping me reasonably dry.

I wrap up in my blanket and watch it fall, changing from big, lonely drops into a decent downpour, then becoming a sheet of water. There’s nothing I can do but sit, and while I’ve been telling myself all along to keep moving, like it was a plan that would make everything okay in the end, that motivation is gone.

I try to tell myself that I’m just taking advantage of the little break, that there’s no point in wandering around and getting soaked to the skin and sliding down wet ridges and maybe even getting struck by lightning. But the truth is I’m tired. I’m tired of walking and not getting anywhere, tired of everything I’ve got hurting, right down to my insides. And I’m tired in the sleepy sense too, even though I know I lay down last night before it was fully dark and the sun had already put in half a day’s work when I woke.

None of this is good, and I know it.

My body is worn out, and my mind is ready to follow that path. Little things have been happening that I haven’t given my full attention to, and now that I’m stuck here I can’t quite ignore them anymore. I talked to a tree yesterday, though I don’t recall what I said. I know it didn’t answer, which is a point in my favor, but the fact that I was disappointed by that is not.

That, and I’ve been thinking about cheese a lot. I probably put in four miles yesterday and I thought about big orange blocks of Colby the whole time. I can’t explain it, but I could see cheese in my mind, right down to the uneven breaks when you pull off a chunk that you want and the way it crumbles in your hand. I even sat down hard at one point, right on my bad foot because it was still up in the sling, and I didn’t really think about the pain too much. I was still caught up in cheese.

The color. The smell. The taste. The texture. I even thought about the way the refrigerator gives off a nice poof of cold air when you first open it, a prelude to cheese.

“A prelude to cheese,” I say to myself aloud. “You’re a fucking idiot.”

That might be true, but it doesn’t mean I can’t sit here in the rain, chewing on grass and thinking about cheese. I guess it’s because it’s something I absolutely can’t have. When I was a kid I wanted all kinds of things that I’d never get: a pony, a dog, a mom. So I’d sit around and think about those things, the fun we’d have, how close we’d be, the places we’d go together.

Funny thing is, even in my daydreams I always ended up taking everybody to the woods.

“Ha ha,” I say, accidentally losing a piece of greenery from my mouth. I pick it out of my bra and pop it back in.

I curl into a ball, blanket draped over the curve of my hips—sharper now, I notice. I can count all my ribs, even in the dark, my fingers tripping over them the same way Momma claimed I did to her, but from the inside. My hands wander to my face, tracing the hollows of my eyes, so deep it’s like my skull is working its way forward.

I’ve always known my body, its strength and purpose, the long muscles of my legs and the lean bulge of my biceps. This is different; this is an intimacy with my skeleton, from the exposed broken tips in my foot to the sharp corner of my jaw digging into the ground as I try to get comfortable. I’m learning the deeper parts of me, maybe even past the ones a doctor can name. Right down into my soft bits and then further, where things you can’t actually touch live.

I’m discovering me out here, for the good and the bad. There’s things I’m proud of and stuff I’d rather forget, but it all makes up who I am and what I was, and what I’ve got to work with if I want to become something else. And I don’t get to do those things or be that person if I die out here.

“Yeah, dumb-ass,” I say, by way of a pep talk.

I let out a big breath, stirring up some of the pine needles in front of my face. There’s a decent breeze, chilly fingers reaching in to find me and lifting the corners of my blanket. I tuck it in tighter, curl closer into myself, and pull Davey Beet’s hat down to my eyebrows.

“Tomorrow,” I tell him. “Tomorrow we’re going to get shit done.”





Day Eleven




It’s raining again in the morning, but I said I was going to move today. So I will.