A Map/A Method

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THE WOODS

Me and her, we go into the woods behind the park on the north side of town, past the crumbling statue of the district’s founder.  Me and her, we go into the woods behind the park, past the people walking their big dogs. Everyone in this part of town seems to have big dogs, which they walk all the time, in the park in front of the woods. Me and her, we go into the woods behind the park, the woods where cyclists go to ride rough dirt paths and high school cross-country teams run in circles. We go into the woods behind the park to walk, because since I came back, we have found there is nothing else we can do without fighting. We go into the woods behind the park, me and her, to walk together. These walks, they are the first things we have done together in a long long time, even though we both remember times when we did everything together. I talk about those times too much, she never mentions them. We walk around the beaten path that runs circular through the woods, thankful for the shade, the shelter from the sun. The path is made of dirt and looks as though it was formed naturally, from people walking this same path over and over, following the footprints of others for years, the way icy paths are pressed into being by layers of footprints in the snow, though she was born in this state and knows nothing of snow. We do not say much, as we follow this path, as I remember the snow from my childhood. We do not say much, but we almost hold hands once, me and her, my hand in hers. We almost hold hands once, I think, but maybe she does not think this. As the sun begins to set, we both agree, we should walk together again here, soon. This is nice, we say, without looking each other in the eyes. We go into the woods, the woods behind the park, me and her. We go into the woods, together, and then, when we leave, we leave in separate cars.

THE PARKS IN THIS TOWN

Me and her, we have been to all the parks in this town, even the one that is falling into the river. We have been to the park on the west end of town, where the ruins of the capitol building lie, from a time when this town mistakenly believed it had been named the capitol of the state. We have lain among those ruins, kissed between the cracked columns, back in a time when we thought we would never fall. We have been to the park on the east side of town, its wooden playground littered with crushed cans of beer and used condoms. We have been to the park on the decrepit south side, where all the amateur magicians practice their tricks and toddlers leap acrobatic through the unpredictable fountain sprays. We have been to the park where every Saturday the merchants set up their stands and tents and colorful kiosks. We have perused their wares, let them shout at us the deals they are offering, and we have walked there on emptier days of the week, found the objects the merchants left behind. Me and her, we have seen all the crumbling statues of the town’s founders, have etched our names into the worn-out stone, have wrapped our names in crudely shaped hearts, back in a time when we thought we would never erode. But now that I am back, no park feels like this park does, no other park has this endless expanse of woods behind it. Me and her, we go into the woods behind this park and we walk, whenever we can, because there is nothing else we can do.

GETTING LOST

When we started walking in the woods behind the park, we followed the path, we didn’t get lost. But one day we go into the woods behind the park, and we don’t mean to get lost, but we do. She finds a path disguised by leaves and branches, wants to follow it instead. I am nervous but I follow her because I will follow her anywhere, hoping the paths she makes will be made more path-like by the paths I make on top of them. This new path, it leads us to an open-air alcove of kudzu, where skeletons of picnickers are tangled in the vines, their baskets ravaged by fire ants. When the canopy returns above the path, we stand before a broken bridge above a dried-up creek. We jump across the narrow ravine. We keep following the path, expecting it to bring us back to the park before too long, the park in front of the woods, but instead we walk for hours, discovering so much of these woods we didn’t even know existed, so many paths that no one has walked on, even though they must have been molded by people walking on them, the erosion caused by travel, the way icy paths are pressed into being by layers of footprints in the snow, though I have not seen snow since my family moved here, away from my home state. When finally we make our way back to the park, night has fallen and the cicadas are singing. Me and her, the next time we walk here, we find ourselves even more lost, and then that becomes the fun: getting lost, together, getting more lost each time, me and her. We look beneath bushes and between trees and find new paths, new places. Years ago we talked about how there was nowhere to go, even though I was content to sit beside her going nowhere. Here, finally, was somewhere we, me and her, could go.

ME AND HER

Me and her, we are the sun and the moon. Sometimes she is the sun and I am the moon, but we are never the same at once, she always rises when I wane. Me and her, we are the sky and the earth. We are the rain and the riptide. We are the mud and the moss. I talk for hours and she says nothing. She plays her guitar and I sit in silence. She smokes a cigarette down to the spark and I cough when her breath enters my lungs. I talk about the way icy paths are pressed into being by layers of footprints in the snow and she talks about a path no one has ever taken. She pets the big dogs as their owners walk them past her, and I avoid their wet breath. When we walk in the woods behind the park, she notices the lotus flowers unfurling and I collect the orchids. I duck beneath the spider webs that carve silver patterns in the air, she sinks her feet into the red dirt mounds the fire ants have made their dirty red homes. When we fight, our fights are torrential storms. Our lovemaking is, too, and one usually follows the other. She was my first love and she will be my last, although there will be many in between. Years from now, I will insist that I loved her from the moment I saw her, even before I saw her. She will claim that she has never loved anything, not once, not for a single second, not at all.

A REMINDER

You left, she reminds me. You left, she reminds me every day. I tell her that I am back now, back for good, but she shakes her head. You left, she says, and when she says that, there is nothing else to say. When I came back, the weather was different than I remembered. Still hot, still humid, but not as harsh. The sweat the temperature pulled from my pores was almost pleasant. When I came back, she was so happy to see me that she cried. We lay on her floor and listened to records, the needle following the grooves the way we later followed paths. But before long, we were fighting again, fighting like we did before I left, before I came back. We were fighting about our fights, about what our fights had been about, about what one of us or the other had done so long ago neither of us could remember what we remembered. It might as well have been a dream, and I can never remember my dreams, and she, she claims, can never sleep. Sometimes, she says, in the middle of night, she wakes up in her bed and cannot move. I move too much in my sleep, I toss and turn, I end up diagonal on my bed. This is something we fought about, the way I kept her up with all my motion, back when we shared our nights together, back when we fought about things and not about our fights. When I came back, once the needle started skipping at our shouts, we realized there was nothing we could do. So we looked for somewhere to walk, somewhere we could walk together, as the sun grew hotter, harsher. A park, maybe, or woods behind a park. Paths and paths and paths.

WHAT WE FIND IN THE WOODS

The deeper we go into the woods, the more we discover the woods are strange, the more signs we see that these woods are made of other things, things that were once something else, somewhere else. There are extraneous slabs of pavement and rusted metal shells in the overgrowth, no sign of their origins. There are acres of bamboo surrounding a swampy pond where something large moves and growls unseen. There is an old abandoned cabin where someone has set up crosses made of rotting wood, broken-down ovens with “Hell is Hot” painted on their doors. There are the rusted skeletal ruins of an amusement park. We find one tree that is plastic, melting slightly in the summer sun. At one point, we arrive in a drainage tunnel beneath a road on the other side of town from the park, the park in front of the woods, having no idea we had come so far. We walk through the tunnel, listening to the cars roar past overhead, and on the other side, we find ourselves amidst more woods. The woods seem to cover the town. We think maybe there is no town, only the woods behind the park. There are other things we find, too, in the woods behind the park. Artifacts, tiny fragments, objects that I pick up and she drops into her purse, which seems bottomless and light no matter how many things we put inside it. We collect postcards someone has hung from branches, the picture on each one a picture of these woods, the scrawled writing on the back sharp and illegible. We collect big collars that big dogs have pulled from their necks, with names like Solomon and Ulysses and Lazarus on the dangling tags. We collect glass bottles with foreign labels, the plastic limbs of discarded dolls, photographs of both our families that someone had framed and buried. These things we collect, they tell a story, I say. She says they say nothing, nothing at all.

AN EXPLANATION

When I left, I left for my home state, to find snow. She didn’t say that she wanted me to leave, but she didn’t tell me to stay, either, and that was what I wanted to hear: for her to tell me to stay, her soft voice nothing like the big dog owners telling their big dogs to do the same. I wanted her to need me here. But she has never needed me, and that is why I have always loved her, and that is why I had to leave, at least for a while, at least for a winter. When I came back, she was so happy she cried, but when I left, she didn’t shed a tear. She came to my house in the morning to say goodbye and she did not tell me to stay, so I left for my home state, to find snow, and I didn’t stay for a winter, but for three, because she never asked me to come back. At first, we kept in touch. We wrote love letters. We sent a journal back and forth, detailing things we hadn’t done together, trips we hadn’t gone on, walks we hadn’t taken, but that was lost in the mail and never found. In my home state, the weather was different than I remembered. Still cold, still windy, but gloomier. The snow was different, too, sharp and stinging, not the soft powder I had once held in my child-soft hands. The first winter, there was a blizzard and the whole city lost power. The snow was so high that no icy paths could be pressed into being by layers of footprints. I sank waist deep into the lawn, lost myself in the white. When the lights finally came back on and the mountain of snow was cleared from in front of my mailbox, there were no messages from her I had missed, no letters that had been caught in the storm, left frozen and undelivered. For two years we didn’t speak, not until I came back, and now, we don’t speak about those days when no words were exchanged between our mouths.

A MAP

Me and her, we decide to map these woods, these woods we purposefully lose ourselves in, these woods behind the park. We decide to map these woods so that we will stop arguing about which path leads where, which direction takes us to which landmark. One day she brings a large sheet of paper, torn from a larger roll. It is thick and white and trails behind her like a cape or a single broken wing. One of the people walking their big dogs has to pull his big dog back as it leaps for the large sheet of paper trailing behind her as she walks with me toward the woods behind the park. We start with the first path, the path that everyone knows, and trace its big circle around the southwest corner of our immense map, marking all the important landmarks. But we also mark other things: I mark every spot where I have imagined making love to her, she marks every insect or tree that has inspired a song she wrote. From there, we branch outward, to all the hidden paths that lead to other hidden places-the abandoned highway, the bottomless cliffs, the meteorite craters. So many trails, spiderwebbing outwards. I see patterns in the paths and she insists there is nothing to be seen beyond what is there. Me and her, we map the woods behind the park. Our fingers are blackened by graphite. We soon realize that the large sheet of paper we chose for our map is too small for the unending paths and creeks and crevices in the woods behind the park. Me and her, we begin attaching other scraps of paper, to expand our map as the woods expand on our walks. We tape my grocery list to the eastern edge, glue her sheet music to the southernmost border. On every side, we staple all the love letters we used to write each other. She doesn’t remember who stopped replying first, but I do. When we leave the woods, finished mapping for the day, we fold our map upon itself many times, until it isn’t anything anymore, so we can know that no one but us will think to find it. When we return the next day, we unfold it from nothing and resume our cartography.

A METHOD

Me and her, we fight about the method we should use to map the woods behind the park. I say we should follow the paths deliberately, marking down all the forks and shortcuts, until we have followed anything there is to follow, until we have connected all the connections in these woods. She says we should start with the strangest landmarks, build our map around those, forge our own paths through the woods, and only then mark our routes in ink. I tell her that’s not practical and she tells me my method is too logical. We debate about the symbols on our legend, the direction that our compass should point. I try to color code the different areas in the woods, but she tells me my divisions are arbitrary and unnecessary. She draws things on the map I have never seen before, and when I point to them and ask her about them, she says they do not exist yet, no, they are the things that we will build, me and her, here in the woods behind the park. I tell her that we cannot add something to the map that isn’t there. It might be misleading. Sometimes, she tells me, it’s better to be misled. Where are we on the map? I ask. I ask her this and she says to me, we are nowhere. We haven’t been built yet.

SEPARATING

Me and her, we cannot agree on the method to make our map. We cannot agree on anything, and then she reminds me again: You left. You left me. When she reminds me of this now, I want to shout at her. I want to say that I left because I loved her too much, that I came back because I hated the world filled with snow when she wasn’t there to feel the cold with me. I want to say that she never told me she wanted me to stay, to be with her. Instead, I say to her: I am leaving now, walking away. She says that she never wanted to map this place, not at all. She knew if we mapped it, we would never be able to get lost again. She says that I have to catalogue everything, assemble everything into something tangible to give it meaning. She says I can never just let something be. I tear the map in half, give her one half and take the other half with me down a path with too many boot prints on it for her to be interested in following. When I look back I see her going the other direction, not looking back. I come to the dried up creek we once had to jump across, but someone has fixed the bridge, repaired it with the crosses and apocalyptic proclamations that once stood outside the empty cabin. When I cross it, it does not lead back to the alcove of kudzu or its skeletized picnickers. Instead, I am somewhere else, somewhere I do not recognize, surrounded by wildflowers of every color, colors I have not seen before, blooming in all directions all around me. I check the map but realize that she has taken the half of the map where I am, if we have mapped this place at all. I walk through the wildflower grove, seeing nothing familiar. When I arrive in a field where the big dogs have been digging up huge fossilized femurs, I begin to wonder if I actually have seen all of this before, when I was still with her. Maybe I have seen all of this before, but I was too busy looking at her, mapping in my mind the irises of her eyes, the palms of her hands, the sound of her voice. Eventually I realize it is growing dark and I cannot find my way out of the woods behind the park. I call out to her, but only hear the big dogs’ howling reply. I wonder if she has been able to escape the woods, but I realize that even if she could, she would not, she would stay here, in the woods behind the park, making new paths until there were no new paths to make, because she does not know how to leave this town the way I did, and here, finally, was somewhere she could go.

DREAMING

In my dreams, in the woods behind the park, it begins to snow. In the woods behind the park, it does not stop snowing. In minutes, all the green and brown and yellow of the woods turns white, the ponds freeze over, and all the paths disappear. With the landscape leveled and no path to take, I begin to walk straight through the inches, then feet, of snow. I keep waiting for icy paths to be pressed into being by layers of footprints in the snow, but there is no one else walking in this vast white expanse, the only footprints I find are my own. I build a pair of snowmen, made to look like me and her. I build another one of her, and another, until in every direction, there is an icy rendering of her. I shape the features on each snowy face. I make a snowmap for each of them. I have the same snowy fights with the snow versions of her, but the snow hers never fight back, they never say a single snowy word. I unfold my half of the map and find it is completely blank. I open up the chests of all the snow versions of her and love letters I have never read tumble into my hands. The snow keeps falling but the lights never go out; I see them between the trees, distant pinprick stars that must belong to houses, to homes. I collapse into the snow. If I wake up, I want to remember the way this felt, all this cold, all this snow melting into me.

WHAT WE FIND IN THE BELLIES OF THE BIG DOGS

In her dreams, we swim in stomach acid, we try to stay afloat. The big dogs have escaped from their owners, broken free from their leashes and collars and followed our scents, devoured us when those scents of ours led them right to us. I smell like sawdust, her fragrance is of feathers. I smell like the pavement after rain, she like the lakeshore at dusk. In the bellies of the big dogs, we find postcards with nothing written on the backs. We find dolls swallowed whole, fully intact. We find the collars and bones and collarbones of smaller dogs that the big dogs have eaten with their bear trap jaws, their infinite hunger. There is not much to explore in the bellies of the big dogs. There is not much to map. Me and her, we hold our heads above the stomach acid, knowing any path will lead us only to small intestine or blood vessels or synapses, and we do not want to be digested or blood-borne or fired off as electrical signals. We are not ready for that. We hold our heads above the stomach acid. We hold onto each other. We hold onto our halves of the map. As long as we are here, we should make ourselves at home, I say. We should hang some pictures from the ribs, we should think about new wallpaper, we should consider getting a dog, but she just shakes her head. She cannot stay anywhere, with anyone. She cannot make herself at home, home is still something she is looking for, something she does not know. She must keep moving, even when she has nowhere to go, even if her limbs seize and stiffen while she sleeps, even if she finds herself frozen in the snow. After all the places I have been, after all the times she reminds me how I left, there is still one thing I know, and I know I have not been misled: home is wherever she may be, and I will follow her anywhere, down the lack of any path, down the throat of any beast. Me and her, we live in the bellies of the big dogs. We feel an earthquake with every howl.

REUNITING

Me and her, we find each other again. I cut the belly of the big dog open and pull her out. She lifts me up, shivering, from the snow that covers every inch of my body. I find her in the cabin constructing a cross from her shattered guitar. She runs into me throwing leeches to the gaping mouth of the swamp monster. I follow her footprints, she follows mine. Me and her, we run circles around each other until we are in each other’s arms and our arms create circles around one another. With a needle and thread she mends our map, and we begin erasing everything: the paths, the landmarks, the pet names we called each other in the cursive landscapes of our love letters. We erase until there is nothing left. Somewhere in the distance, we can hear trees fall. We hear paths unwind and disappear. We hear cicadas stop singing. Me and her, we outline the big dogs on our now blank and empty map, we outline their bodies where we know they are in the woods. We watch their shapes move toward us on our map, for we have also outlined our bodies on our map, built ourselves up from nothing. We hear the big dogs, howling in the distance, in the dark. Me and her, we walk toward the sound, we feel its pull, while their voices, rough and ragged, drift up toward the waning moon, toward a sky that is turning a blank and endless white. We walk and we wait, me and her. We wait and wait to be swallowed up by everything, to be folded into nothing.