The Valley

I had managed to get lost in the jungle-like Pololu valley where I had slung my hammock up amongst the towering trees for the night. Now I was panicking, while stumbling blindly in the deep ebony blanket of darkness that enveloped everything, slowly encasing me in shadow. My thirst felt suddenly unquenchable, as if I was lost at sea surrounded only by salty water that would act more like cyanide that savior. I needed water. It was at my camp, but where was that? 

I scrambled frantically along the worn trails that twisted through the valley floor under the canopy. Strange Hawaiian tales of Nightmarchers, seeped insidiously into my mind. Those ghostly dead warriors who march through the night in the sacred places, chanting incantations, blowing their shells, and causing any mortal who gazes upon them to die violently. My eyes darted psychotically around on the lookout for torches. For a moment, my breath caught in my throat because I thought I heard the beating war drums but it was only my heart attempting to free itself from the cage of my chest.  

Everything was black except the tiny pin-light stars dotting the sky in endless wonder that I could see peeking through the leafy treetops. It felt like a thousand lights waiting distantly at the end of a tunnel the size of the universe for me to find my way through this layered midnight. The ocean nearby roared and moaned her flowing secret language punctuated with crashes on the shore. When I peeked out in a clearing, I was somehow on the stone laden shore with the undulating and tumultuous waves of rhythmic motion in a nearly invisible giant liquid pool of black ink. I slipped back into the trees that rustled in the breeze adding their voices in response to the sea.   

The more effort I exerted in trying to find my camp the thirstier I felt and the thirstier I felt the more panicked and the more panicked the more I tried to find my camp. The cycle just looped on repeat, a broken record. Is this it? Somehow in my mind morning would never come, I would be forever trapped in this darkness, searching, coming up empty handed.

A flicker of flame. 

Were my eyes deceiving me? Was it the Nightmarchers? No. No. Just a bonfire.

Relief poured into my chest and flooded out to my limbs, like rivers reaching longingly for the sea. I was not alone in the valley, not alone in the dark, someone else was here. I wandered toward the flames, as they burned a hole in my vision, until they were all I could see. It was as if one of those distant stars had fallen to earth, and the tunnel had grown shorter in moments, the light more tangible. The darkness was evaporating, and in its place brilliant oranges, reds, and yellows were dancing, drawing me closer, charring away my fear. Finally, my wide eyes peeked out from behind the foliage ensconcing the fire.

A hammock, not unlike my own, was stretched out between two trees like taffy being pulled. The fire was surrounded by a circle of stones, and beyond the circle, slabs of old wood to sit on. He was sitting there, staring at me as if I were see-through, just something he imagined. To him, I must have appeared an apparition from the dark void of the jungle, caked in mud, panting aggressively, a delirious smile smeared across my face. A laugh burst forth uninhibited from my throat, because he was the one who seemed the mirage. Not I. He had appeared when I needed him most, a collection of comfort and light, from a pervasive black hole that I was lost inside. An oasis amongst the desert of my being. We stared across the fire at each other, both of us each other’s ghosts. He held up a hydroflask presumably filled with water. I was immediately as his side, gulping the water down, allowing it to gush through my chest.  

“I thought you might be thirsty.” His voice was kind and warm like his fire. 

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” It was all I could seem to say.

“What’s your name?” He inquired. “I’m Lane.”

My name? My name. What was my name? I felt like I couldn’t remember anything about myself. I tried to think of it but all that came to mind was saying thank you again for the water, for the fire, for saving me from the dark. I tried to remember how I ended up in this valley, in Hawaii, in this moment. Nothing came. My head was air. He chuckled at my silence. He looked at me and asked if I needed something to eat. The next thing I knew, I was eating a sandwich and he was heating a big rock near the fire. Something about him seemed so familiar, like he had saved me before, many times.

“Your eyes…”, I trailed off, feeling suddenly uneasy. 

“What about my eyes, Elle?” He asked with a knowing look.

Shivers shot down my spine, goosebumps ravished my body, every hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up like a forest of pine trees. I hadn’t said my name. I hadn’t even remembered my name until just now when he spoke it. His eyes looked just like my brother’s eyes. I shook off the thought. He was a memory that made my gut feel as if it was inside a trash compactor, squeezing, tightening, condensing into a hard ball of pain that was like living with a boulder inside you; an incessant heaviness that lived in the pit of your being and sat there forever unmovable. The fire crackled, I looked at Lane and saw sparks dancing in his eyes as my own filled with tears. 

“How do you know my name?” I whispered almost inaudibly, my glassy eyes leaking a river of emotion. 

“You know. We’ve been over this before, many times.” He picked up a rock he had been warming by the fire and placed it on the slab of wood we were sitting on. “Here, sit on this, you’ll feel better.”

I didn’t understand. I sat on the warm rock, numb, confused, feeling lightheaded as if my brain was a balloon that might float away and leave my body behind. 

“I don’t understand.” I sobbed.

“You always say that.” 

“I’ve never met you.”

“We meet every night and every night we decide.”

“Decide? What do we decide?” I rattled off with a high hysterical tone. 

“Who will leave this valley.”

“Why can’t we both leave?”

“Because only one of us can.” His voice was solemn. 

I started to panic. He was completely insane, he thought he knew me, or he was deranged and fucking with my head. My heart pulsed rapidly to the beat of some drum line crescendo, and it felt as if an IV of fear had been inserted into my veins, coursing through every fiber of my physical form. My savior was a psychopath. He was going to kill me in this valley. I needed to run right now, throw something at his face, beat him with a rock. I needed to act, needed to do something, anything. No, I’d never make it out. I couldn’t even find my own camp. I sat frozen on a warm rock, waiting for impact, waiting for darkness.

But he wasn’t moving, he was just looking at me with those kind eyes of my brother. I finally looked back at him, stared at him, taking him in. He looked almost identical to my brother I could now see. His hammock looked almost identical to mine. This valley even looked identical to…

“NO!” I screamed at him.

I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to remember. I wanted to forget everything. But it all came back without my permission. My father beating my brother until he wasn’t moving, in this valley. He had forgot the water up at the car. My brother’s eyes, staring, staring off up at the distant stars, indifferent, unblinking. The shadow hands of death and fear creeping through the trees, reaching out and griping my heels, dragging me down deep into the darkness. Without thinking, I had taken a rock warming by the fire, bashed my father’s head in, and then sat on the rock until it went cold before crawling into my hammock. Both of their last words had been the same, “Elaine!”. They had called out to me, to save or spare them. 

“Take it away from me.” I begged Lane. 

“I always do. That’s why I’m always the one to leave the valley. I’ll always appear when you need me most.”   

It was what my brother had always said to me to make me feel safe, but Lane wasn’t my brother I now realized. He was me. He was pieces of memories. He was my ghost and I was his. Together, we made the memory complete, brought it to life. Separately, the memory was torn apart, and vaporized into unintelligible spectral whispers.

“Splitting in two is the only way to make it go away.” He relayed with a genuine heartbroken sadness.

“Then you leave the valley, I’ll stay.” I responded, finally understanding. 

He was going to face everything beyond the valley, he was going to be where I needed him most, protecting me, keeping me safe. The valley was safe now, the valley was all mine. I wouldn’t remember who I was sometimes, or why I was there, but I also wouldn’t remember what I had done, what my father had done, what had been lost. 

“When the sun comes up, you won’t remember any of this or me and you’ll feel happy. But come night, I have to come back to the valley, and my presence here always causes you panic as well as peace.” He explained.

“You help me when I’m lost in the dark, but you bring the darkness.”

“Something like that. Sometimes the past is far more haunting than any ghost could ever be.” He shrugged and hugged me. 

I watched him leave, hiking away out of the valley, up the trail that steeply inclined into and out of the valley floor. Once he was gone, the soft glow of morning lit every trail and illuminated each green hued leaf. Color returned. Light returned. I could hear the ocean calmly humming as I walked to the shore to gaze at the rising sun. In that moment, the night disappeared, and day was all I knew.

**

After leaving, Lane woke up where he always did, in the body of Elaine. Somewhere within Elaine‘s mind was the hidden valley, where Elle was basking in the light of day, already forgetting what had occurred.

The therapist came in as she did every morning. 

“May I speak with Elaine?” The therapist inquired, as always.

“Elaine is gone.” He knew it wasn’t the answer she wanted but it was the one he always gave.