Fourteen

by Kat W

I was a fresh fourteen the first time my blurry eyes followed the steep, winding mountain road through the car window, before that winding road wove our stubby fingers together and the world weathered them, and before the crumbling asphalt jolted them apart. Clarity came and splashed across the thirsty pavement and my smooth body trembled from the chill of the February wind, the warmest welcome my fading youth would find in the bare branches of the trees. They claimed we kids weren’t afraid of anything, so they made us afraid, laid us small and shivering at the foot of the mountain forest peeled naked by the melted snowstorms, kneeling in the shadow of their menace to witness the tips of the overgrown branches slice across the sky, pierced with the peaks of mountains that appeared too soft to be so unforgiving, the web of wood scattered like spines to catch what little could fall in this weather, jutting out to cut us with a warning. And a month I waited for the world to flower into home again, until there you stood in that dusty gym, shrunken and shrouded in a thrifted coat splotched green and gray and goldenrod like the spiraling patchwork of your eyes. And I think right then I knew this was it. This was the why I had been straining to find.

I couldn’t explain how those first few months made us into what we were. We resisted the spring, resisted becoming and blooming, until the salt in the May showers eroded the walls we’d constructed out of necessity, but we had always been standing at the floodgates, begging ourselves to let each other in, even when habit refused us. Before we could put the words to what we were feeling, we felt it, and it was fuller than the bushes and branches became during those early days. We watched the world come into color with our hands inches apart before you finally brought them together beneath the summer sun. We were sitting on that creaking porch, the gleam in your eyes almost indistinguishable from the sun-soaked forest below, the day we made the woods ours. Within your enthusiasm my reservations dissipated, melted beneath your glowing gaze. My toes crunched the pine beneath our feet, and some part of me learned how to feel as I held you and, finally, our lips met. We rejoiced under birdsong and buzzing, so young, so alive, hand in hand. The youth they had stolen returned less in deed, but in emotion, and I loved you. So I told you.

I love you.

You were the last thing I saw before I fell asleep each night, as you whispered it back across our only divide, a bed beside a bed. And we clung to each other, concealed by the leaves, day after day, month after month, solace from hostility. Time couldn’t touch us, yet had us completely and totally captured. And there are always moments in love when you look at that person and wonder how they ended up in your arms, how you can live in their chest. You would take my breath and hold it in your fragile lungs, and I would live in your blood and your muscle, but not once did I ask how we ended up here, belonging to each other entirely. We both knew how we were what we were and why. Survival. Desperation.

Nature.

And as the leaves browned, our heartbeats slowed and merged, and the novelty of our miracle faded into a steady force of comfort. Our feet steadied as the branches began to sway in the fall breeze, the sky dulled and our fingers found their place laced in each other’s. After months and months, our tired feet approached the summit of the mountain as we gasped in the thin air and, god, we could finally rest.

And then, suddenly, we were falling.

But I landed safely and you didn’t, and I couldn’t catch you, and the leaves didn’t break your fall, and our haven betrayed us when we needed it most, the trees turned angry when they were stripped of what concealed us, and the seasons became a reflection of us, the absence of leaves and uncovered secrets, and you just kept falling and falling.

But I stopped. For me, it all stopped.

It’s like that scared little kid was frozen in amber, settled between the branches, and I can still see myself in that bold, carefree stance, gripping the rotting wooden holds and tiptoeing up the carcass of that trunk. I can still see your eyes bursting with all the hues of the forest foliage, tangled in the twigs, glittering sun peeking through the leaves as if through stained glass. We consecrated that forest. It became our holy ground, a place of consuming, enduring love at a time when I was so scared of sacrilege. And how could something like this be anything less than divine, with the splendor of God-given life surrounding us? How could I ever have believed this was wrong? And we weren’t condemned with the name of God, but for the sake of our sanity. And that just wasn’t fair to the fourteen-year-olds who had to learn right then that life wasn’t fair.

They presented me with laurels but no wreath, barred me from standing with the victors, alone with my hard-won loss, wrists bound, mouth sewn shut, I went from being exemplary to being made an example. And they kept you from me under threat until I found the strength to hold the weight of my heavy heart and carry it from the frozen forest. I was loved. And I was selfish. And I was so, so selfish.

As I took that same winding road one final time, as I watched our trees disappear behind the white hills, I wept for you, and for us, and for the version of myself whose tears had first spilled onto this pavement. I wept like I was grown.

And the last time I saw you, your skin was pulled taut against your growing frame, yet you felt smaller. The bags under your eyes were like bruises, the only visible marks of their violence, your chapped cheeks couldn’t absorb your tears, and you were once again bundled in a coat. I don’t know if my cheekbones carved themselves with age or if the winter melted the fat from my youthful face. I emerged from those woods not a child, not an adult, and nowhere in between, but something defying age and time entirely, again outside of and fully seized by its passage. But this isn’t about the after. There is no after, not really.

I heard they made you stay the month, just to hammer it all home. Home. A place you never returned to. This was our home, and these mountains will always be a shelter, like a trunk hollowed out by some creature seeking refuge from harsh weather, a momentary shelter before the seasons draw them somewhere kinder. But you can’t take shelter in the very place you need shelter from. You waited, and the winter winds called. So you picked up your thinning bones and let the snow cover your footprints at their beckoning, because you no longer had the luxury of being loved.