Phases of The Moon

By the time I reached the cabin, just after two a.m., the Texas countryside lay beneath an ocean of shadow so thick I couldn’t see my hand an inch from my face. This was a darkness so complete that it threatened to fill you. I looked up to the sky for some relief but found only an even vaster emptiness. Yes, there were stars, but their pale light seemed to mock more than illuminate. They were lights for other worlds, other people, other times – a reminder that not everyone lived in my deep shadows. The moon was new, a shadow within shadows, a world that emitted no light of its own. All light from the moon is reflected light. Without the sun, it is a dead rock.

Dear Kyle, I arrived at the cabin at two a.m. It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I’d hiked from Saratoga back into the deep woods, just as you had a year earlier. I can imagine your face, flushed and sweaty, as you walked up this overgrown path towards the cabin. That face! Why is it that I can only imagine you as a child now? Every time I picture your face, I see you as five years old, bent over a book, lost in worlds that didn’t exist, in Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Adventure books. Little Kyle, lost in your adventures.

I turned my flashlight towards the cabin. We called it a cabin, but really it was an abandoned vacation house. Almost two-hundred years ago, my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather built this house – or the bones for this house – with his bare hands from the pine woods that surrounded it. He had arrived from Germany a few years before that and had achieved some success as a retailer. This was where he came to get away from the bustle of “town”. The few hundred acres I still owned reflected his accomplishments, not my own.

The front porch creaked as I mounted the steps. There was no door – rather, there was a door, but it lay on its side against the front of the cabin. There was no barrier to keep the shadows out of the cabin. The shadows poured in, filled every corner.

I stood in the doorway and shone my flashlight around. A small parlor fed into a narrow hallway that ended in two bedrooms in the back. To the right, a small kitchen and dining area connected directly to the parlor. I imagined my predecessors moving through this space – all German bustle and energy. I imagined Kyle moving through the space a year ago today. His energy would have been quite different.

I crossed the parlor and started down the hallway. One bedroom on the right and one on the left. They’d found him in the room on the right. I wasn’t ready for that yet, so I entered the room on the left.

Dear Kyle, there was a new moon tonight. No light at all. That means when you arrived, there had probably been a gibbous moon – maybe enough moonlight to navigate the cabin with no flashlight. I know that’s how you preferred to travel, with no artificial illumination. You stood at the kitchen sink the last time I saw you and said it was important to know that darkness is the “real truth”. I’d heard you say it but didn’t really understand. There was such a gulf between us by then. I thought you were quoting one of your books. I made a joke about the real truth and the weather – I can’t remember it. Had I known that the darkness you talked about was not the darkness of a Texas countryside, I wouldn’t have laughed. Maybe I’d have crossed the kitchen, and took your wet hands – washing the dishes, such a thoughtful kid – and told you that I’m here for you. But I didn’t.

The floorboard on the bedroom on the left had decayed to such a degree that I couldn’t take two steps past the doorway. The window on the far wall was caked with grime. Part of the ceiling had caved in, allowing access to the natural elements that had accelerated the room’s decay. Two-hundred years ago, my blood relatives had lived out part of their lives in this room. How many minutes? How many hours? How many days of their finite lives did they stare through that window and make plans for their futures? Now shadows had buried all their days and nights. Their reveries had been lost to the “real truth”.

I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I turned and crossed the hallway to the bedroom on the right. The roof in this bedroom remained mostly intact. The floorboards had escaped the elements thus far. A sleeping bag lay in the far corner. I walked across the creaking floor and looked down at the final resting place of my only son.

Dear Kyle, when you left you told me that you would write and that I should write you back. I asked you why write when we can just text. You’d given me that look – the look where you want to explain something to me but know that the gulf can’t be crossed. Instead of arguing, you’d hugged me and told me you loved me and turned and walked away. I watched you disappear down the street with your travel pack heavy on your shoulders. I’d wondered then how many years it would take for you to get past this part of your life – the part where you feel the need to wander through the world, a part of it yet detached from it. Alone in a population of billions. I thought it was a phase. I looked forward to the day when you would sit in my living room and have a beer with me and just be.

I turned off the flashlight and sat on the sleeping bag. I have experience darkness in my life. When the state police called me to tell me they’d found Kyle. When I stood over my son’s coffin as they lowered him into the ground. When I stood in my house and realized for the first time – truly realized – that my son would never cross the threshold again, would never look at me with that funny grin of his. That darkness was like this darkness, the darkness of this countryside cabin on a moonless night – complete. One year ago, my only son sat on this sleeping bag and made a decision. He decided that there was nothing on this side of the darkness that was worth holding on to. So he’d taken some pills, laid his head back, and crossed over into whatever lay beyond.

I know why, but I also don’t know why. I know that mental health is like the phases of the moon – that it waxes and wains, that sometimes the light disappears entirely, and that during the darkest phase you are a shadow within shadows. But I thought my love was enough, that the remembered and enduring light of it would carry him through to the next day, and the next, and the next. But as I sat there on Kyle’s sleeping bag, on that place in the world where he left me behind, I understand that there is a deeper darkness, one in which the worlds stop turning altogether, where the universe freezes and all that’s left is the emptiness of the new moon forever.

Dear Kyle, in the note you left, you said to tell me you were sorry. I wish you hadn’t said that. I wish that on top of whatever you were feeling you didn’t have to suffer with the guilt of leaving me behind. I wish I’d written you letters. I wish I’d written you so many letters that you never had time to read them all. I wish I’d written you so many that you had to turn on your flashlight in this dark cabin to read them. Maybe that light would have pushed back the darkness. Maybe the light from one letter would have given you enough hope for one more day.

I laid back and stared up at the dark ceiling. A few holes in the roof gave me a glimpse of the stars. I let myself follow those stars, follow those faint traces of light, through my memories of my son. Each memory seemed like that – like a bright dot in a vast darkness. At some point I drifted off to a deep, dreamless sleep. I woke to a chilly morning. Birds sang in the grass and in the towering pines that surrounded the cabin. I sat up and looked around. I was surprised to find that the cabin seemed to be in relatively good shape given its age. What had looked like rot and decay in the shadows seemed to be minor blemishes in the light. Maybe I’d come back in a week or two and make some repairs. Maybe I’d restore what time and weather and shadow had tried to destroy.

I left Kyle’s sleeping bag where it lay and stepped out into the gathering dawn. Stepping off the porch, I looked up into the sky and saw the gradations of black fading to blue. Darkness fading to light. And as I started down the overgrown path on the long trek home, I took comfort in the fact that somewhere on the other side of world, the darkness had passed, the new moon had ended, and that somewhere a child was looking up at the smallest sliver of hope, could feel on his face the faintest glow of moonlight.