Durchdenwald

Content warning: this story contains depictions of self harm, implied suicide, domestic violence, and mental health.

“Then leave, Adam. I know you want to.”

Truman is wrong. He always is when we fight like this. Shutting down the second my voice raises above two decibels. He only likes words shared in whispers, saying there’s no need to be anything but gentle. But again, he is wrong.

Truman has had the annoying privilege of never needing to be non-gentle, floating through his hug-filled life. Two parents. No heartbreak or pain clogging his mind. This lightness is what I fell in love with five years ago.

I thought it’d fix me, all of that naive optimism, it had to.

“So stupid,” I kick the sodden dirt. It gives with the pressure, grabbing hold of my boot. It’d pull me under if I let it. Drowning me beneath the impenetrable wall of looming sequoias.

The suction of the mud echoes off the bloody bark for hours as I put more space between me and the apartment. I bet he’s sitting in the living room, head in his hands, wondering what’s wrong with me and I wish I knew. I wish I could give him something, a promise to be better, or at least the reason we’ve become so polarized.

I’ve gone around and around and the only thing I can come up with is that it's me. I’m the problem, the thing muddying up Truman’s perfect life.

It’s what I’ve done, not only the past five years but my whole life. The reason my parents couldn’t love each other. The boy no one could stay friends with beyond a single school year. A person not even an anomaly could love.

I taste my tears before I feel them, salt and capitulation.

The forest pulls me deeper, guiding me under the fissure of the fading sun. No break between trunks or leaves. Until there is.

A clearing to my right, cut open and glowing, the grass collecting the remaining light in a perfect bowl. I get closer and no, it's not perfect. A spiral staircase stands erect in the center, solid metal like it was placed here yesterday.

My body moves toward it of its own accord, winning the fight with my mind that this is too strange. That I’ve gone too far. I should go back.

I can’t do anything but step closer.

My right foot mounts the first step. It creaks low under my weight. The metal threatens to topple as I get higher. I suppose even for this mystical staircase I am a problem.

I regain control at the top, one white-knuckled hand on the railing. It’s about ten feet to the ground. Only ten feet, but the right angle and it should still do the trick. Rid me and the world of problems.

I close my eyes and take my last step forward.

The seconds to the end pass in years. One; I throw my weight over my head. Two; sweet summer air invades my lungs one last time. Three; how long will it take for someone to find me in this clearing? Four.

My face hits first, a solid jolt of pain into my right cheekbone.

It is only when the rest of my body joins that I hear it, the hollow hit on wood, not the slick grass I’d been anticipating. I wait, for death or god, but nothing comes.

No omnipotent voice, no lessening of the pain in my head or knees. Just me, my cheek, and the scratchy wood.

“Fuck.” I push myself up, rubbing the sore spot on my head. The stairs are gone and in their place is a closed square door breaking up worn wood planks.

My legs wobble when I stand. I steady them and my nerves on a stack of boxes adorned with a sloppy “Christmas” written on the sides. Weak light filters in through a small circular window along the far wall highlighting the years of dust and untouched memories. It’s an attic.

A sound comes from below, a man’s voice, booming and weighted. Followed by a woman’s, weeping and broken.

Everything comes into focus, the exact tone and words the people downstairs use to tear each other apart, the dust-free corner decorated with a stolen pinstripe cushion and a stack of old comic books I'd found in one of dad’s boxes. This isn’t just an attic, but my attic, the one I happily abandoned the day after graduation along with the voices and screams from my parents that seem to penetrate every wall and floor no matter how far I get away.

Maybe I really did die in the fall.

I pinch my arms.

“I didn’t want this!” My father shouts, exactly as he did sixteen years ago.

“Then leave!” My mother shouts back. “Adam and I will be just fine without you!”

I plug my ears and head toward my corner. My footfalls are louder than they were when I was eleven, I’m sure my parents can hear me. I’m sure they know where I am, but I know they wouldn’t dare come up here.

The window is dimpled and foggy but I can make out vague shapes of trees that once lined our yard. I used to imagine running away into them until I was far enough to no longer hear the yelling or my name used as a ping pong of insult. I probably would have had I not met Truman when I did. Two weeks after university when the threat of moving back in with my parents loomed menacingly over my last summer of freedom.

My father’s yell vibrates through the attic. He never wanted children and made sure my mother and I didn't forget it.

I’ve been told he was better when I was young, but sometime around when I turned three and began showing my personality that changed.

When Mom calls she tells me he’s different now, but I don’t understand why I had to leave his life for him to love me.

He only ever hit Mom a handful of times that I’m aware of. He never left any marks and never did it in front of me, aside from once.

I was eleven. The attic was less sound-proof that day. Mom had just returned from the store, she’d run into a friend and that was all that was needed to set him off.

I didn’t see the first punch, just heard Mom’s scream and scrambled down the ladder in time to catch his fist land on her right cheek. I leapt forward, shoving him over and over but he didn’t budge. That was the day I got my first black eye and realized that I was too small to do anything beyond hide and pray for things to end.

I was so small that I could sit crisscrossed entirely on the cushion where now my legs bow out in large awkward heaps. Too big for the cushion or my hideout. Too big and yet not big enough.

I inspect my harsh knuckles, scarred from petty bar fights and childhood scraps. They look just like my father’s.

Another yell booms through the floor followed by a scream and I am eleven again, socks slipping on the wood and each rung until I hit solid ground.

I should be in the hallway, exactly eight running steps to my parents but again I’ve been transferred, this time to an afternoon-bright classroom.

I’m alone. The desks are set into neat rows, with one sitting askew, my old Star Wars backpack slung on the back of my seat. It’s instinct to grab it, but I stop in my tracks as the voices start again. Several hushed whispers right outside the classroom door.

“Do we have to invite him?” A girl asks.

“Adam’s not that bad,” a boy says pityingly.

“He’s such a drag,” the girl whines. “I couldn’t even enjoy it with him sniveling and crying all night.”

“He did say he didn’t like the woods,” the first boy says.

“I think he pissed his pants,” a different boy laughs. The girl joins in, but it’s only them. Liam and Julia. If I recall correctly it was Julia who mocked me until I joined them into the woods, and Liam who convinced the others to abandon me after the sun went down. He was right though, I did piss my pants but he wasn’t around to see it. Only Monty stayed back.

Monty.

Even just the memory of his name fills my heart with lead.

“But we always go to the movies together,” Monty says.

“He’s always such a crybaby,” Julia retorts, like it’s obvious. Maybe it is. She’s not the first person to call me that.

Truman’s voice echoes in my mind, “Don’t be such a crybaby.” He’d said it lovingly after a movie about a dog living multiple lives to reunite with their owner. It was lighthearted in the way things are with Truman.

I haven’t cried around him since.

“Invite Piss Boy if you want, but you’re the one sitting next to him,” Liam says, mirth clear in his voice, “I don’t want to get wet.”

God, I haven’t heard that nickname in a decade. Piss Boy. It’s so stupid and childish that it makes me laugh.

I remember this day so clearly. Monty asked me to go to the movies, not knowing I’d overheard their conversation. He was so sweet about it, saying he wanted to sit by me so we could still joke during the loud parts. The other two didn’t say a word to me, and after a few weeks, they didn’t speak to Monty either.

They hated me in the way only children can, for no reason and violently. It seems so stupid now, holding onto this memory where a boy that hasn’t been relevant in fourteen years called me Piss Boy.

I open the classroom door, but like with my parents, my old friends aren’t in the hall.

I make it to the main entrance without any other voices or memories intruding and pull open the double doors bracing for impact as I step outside.

Bracing was the smart thing to do as I’m pushed to my knees by a non-physical force.

I’m in a tent. My knees landed on the edge of a navy blue sleeping bag that rests in a rumpled mess. A lantern is on despite the sunlight breaking in through the fabric in a negative branch pattern. There is no voice outside.

The corresponding memory recalls itself instantly.

Late March of senior year. Monty and I had decided to spend our last Spring Break camping. Everything was as it always had been; we swam in the creek, ate too many Doritos, and stayed up giggling over dumb half-told jokes.

Everything was the same the second day until the sun disappeared and Monty kissed me.

When we exited the tent that next morning the forest opened up. Leaves sang to us in the breeze, branches waved and guided us to a small floral meadow where spiderwebs hung like fairy lights over the tops dotted with morning dew. We spent hours there and things were how they’d always been aside from the periodic peck or graze of a now nervous hand.

It was the fourth day that things changed. Nervousness turned to desperation, pecks turned to gasps, and jokes and giggles turned to confessions.

“Lovesick,” was what Monty called us.

I wish I could take it all back but keep the memories. The steady weight of his hand on my spine, the softness of his hair between my fingers, his sure whisper of my name in the dark. But I need to let them all go.

Monty is not here.

He hasn’t been since the night after graduation when we tried to work things out, only Monty’s version of worked out included acting like nothing happened and mine focused on trying to convince him to kiss me again.

“What you’re doing is sick!” I’d shouted in the back of Julia’s graduation party.

“No,” he said, cold and calculated like a bullet aimed at my heart, “you’re the one that’s sick Adam.”

Lovesick. That’s what he said. Then when I woke up alone I thought something had happened to him. And something did. He changed his mind.

I had left the tent, again alone in the woods, only this time he left me in the light. It was enough to convince me that he wasn’t waiting anywhere knowing I’d be scared.

Even in the daylight the trees closed in, the spaces between the brush looking like faces all watching as I stumbled through the forest with the hastily rolled sleeping bag and poorly closed tent in my Star Wars backpack.

He didn’t talk to me at school for two weeks. Then again after graduation for ten years. I heard he’s married now to a woman from Boston. They might even have children. I wonder if he’s filtered me out of the stories he tells them, or averts his eyes when he says my name.

I wonder if he’s kept up with me, if he hates me for not keeping up with the lie. By dating a man, putting an arrow on his back that points directly to the time we were together.

I haven’t even told Truman about him. I didn’t want him to see me so pathetic, someone so easy to leave. But he’s gotten the worst of me. I am no longer helpless, or a child, or naive and I take that all out on him.

Maybe he was right, I did want to leave, but can’t he see that I didn’t want to hurt him? My past bursting out of me like a swallowed sprouting tree.

I unzip the tent and push myself out into the morning chill. My front door stands ten inches from me, solid and threatening. Our window is open and there he sits. Truman with his head in his hands, sitting in my spot on the sofa.

The weight of the woods lifts and I can breathe again. I don’t know what I will say, or how I will say it but I can’t run this time.

I steady my breath and brace for the fall as I open the door.