Don't Cry Wolf

When you’re 24, you can eat dark chocolate for breakfast and none would be the wiser. 

I think of this as each smooth square melts on my tongue, crunching roasted hazelnuts couched inside as the chocolate disappears. I finish the whole bar, lick my fingers clean, then glance at the kitchen clock and realize I should’ve left an hour ago. 

Nothing’s packed. Nothing’s planned. I don’t recognize this body I’ve inhabited lately: the one devoid of any fire in my belly, zest in my step, or care in the whole wide world.

I decide to take a shower. It gives me something to do and time to think if I’m really going to go drive north to look for something I can probably find right here if I tried.

A few minutes under hot water and I still haven’t made up my mind. I decide to stall longer by shaving my legs. I roll the blade slowly up from my ankle to my shin, all the way to the top of my knee. I turn to a new angle and start again at the bottom. 

I knick my skin. Right on the Achilles tendon. Blood flows profusely. I watch it drip off my heel and swirl down the drain. Glug glug glug. Eventually, I snap out of the hypnosis, rinse the blade, and turn off the shower. Blood spots the bathroom rug and gray stone tiles as I step out. I pat myself dry and examine the cut again.

It will be a bitch to clean and I’d rather not put in the effort. Besides, sometimes I like letting the blood dry out on its own, forming its own goopy protective layer over the wound. There’s a word for it: coagulate. I love that word. I wished I used it more often so I could indulge in its four juicy syllables: co-ag-u-late.

Hmm, yeah. I’m gonna let that shit coagulate. 

I rub the steam from the bathroom mirror and pick apart my reflection: this is the skinniest and palest I’ve been for as long as I can remember. The bruises on my skin are more evident because of it. My shoulders and arms are toned but every single muscle in my body is feeling a soreness unlike ever before. I realize this strength is just an illusion because if someone laid a finger on me, I think I’d fall apart completely. 

This is what happens when you join a pandemic fight club of sorts. I can’t say much more as we all know the first rule, but suffice to say, three to four times a week, I put everything I’ve got inside sweaty gym gloves, unleash it on various animate and inanimate objects, and feel depleted the rest of the time. 

I brush my teeth. Slather on some sunscreen. Pull on some base layers and walk back to the kitchen where I fill up my canteen of water. I scroll mindlessly on my phone, then look at the clock: if I had left two hours ago, I’d already be halfway there. I should go.

I walk back to my bathroom, pick up my toothbrush and notice the bristles are already wet. Did I already do that? Short-term memory loss and insomnia has me going in circles, wasting time as if i’m running on an infinite supply. I should know better. I do know better. Somehow that makes it all feel worse.

Like that recurring dream where I’m on a sinking ship and someone keeps reaching out their hand to lift me onto the life raft but I turn away, looking for another way out. I knock on walls and rattle doors as the water level creeps up my legs, then my torso, then my neck. I refuse the hand. It just seems too easy. Too obvious. I don’t trust it.

Then the dream transforms into all things. Wild things. Dreams of change. Dreams of excess. Dreams of rage. Dreams of trespass. Dreams that take me to retrace my steps. Dreams that catapult me far-forward. Dreams where I am hugging you and you hug me back and there is an unspoken forgiveness between us both, broken by the alarm clock that rang one hour too early because I forgot about Daylight Savings.

Have you lost the plot yet?
So have I.
Let’s retrace until we find it.

Ah, there I am: stuffing clothes in a duffel and tossing it into the trunk of my car.
My dad steps out to ask if I’m leaving.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Looks like it.”
“I’m still thinking it over.”
He tells me if I stay we can spend time together.
I wonder why he mentions this 
Never when I’m here,
But
Only and Always
As I am about to leave.
I decide right then and there I’m going to go.
“I’ll be back Sunday.”

A gallon of gas is just two-and-a-half bucks. Those are two words I haven’t said in a while: bucks and gallon. For the last chapter in my life, I’ve been paying euros to fill liters to drive kilometers. This chapter closed before I was ready for it to. Before I learned how to hold a conversation or drive a manual transmission. It closed on someone else’s terms— not mine. A bad ending to a good story. Or maybe a good story with an unfinished ending. I can’t tell yet. 

Anyway— two-and-a-half bucks is a dangerously low price… the kind that gets you  going and might never let you stop. 

Except the one thing I have to do before I get to where I’m going is cross the godforsaken plot of land between Tucson and Phoenix. That’s another word I love but use sparingly so it still means something when I do. God-for-sa-ken. I don’t know why I hate it so much. Why my whole life, it’s felt like the patch between me and everything else. And how nauseating of a metaphor it is that the only way out is through…

…through Deadman’s Wash, Carefree Highway, and Happy Valley (I beg to differ). Past the billboards about broken AC units, fresh beef jerky, and finding Jesus Christ. Did you know they advertise about weed pizza now? Four months away, and I’m an alien here. A legal alien.

But let’s put a pin in that because I’m in the drive-thru now and just noticed there’s a new, unmissable freckle on my pinky. I can’t for the life of me remember when it got there. I stare at the new brown dot on my tenth digit when— for the first time— Starbucks spells my name right but gets my order completely wrong. I think of the odds of these things while I sip my drink and realize, suddenly, that I forgot to put on or pack any underwear. 

I’m halfway there, and so far, none of this is how I expected it to go.

How is anything supposed to go anyway? I marvel at my limitless naivety. My clumsy albeit good-intentioned attempts to travel spectacular distances only to find myself back at the beginning of the circle, whimpering quietly in my den, licking new wounds that feel the same but taste different. 

I round the corner of I-17 and climb in elevation. Alpine treetops line the horizon and eventually, the rim of the Grand Canyon fills the view. You might’ve heard of it— it’s one of the wonders of the world—but I wonder, as I lift my foot off the accelerator, why when I should feel some kind of awe, all that washes over me is a pang of how much I did not miss this. Any of this. 

I’d call it indifference except the vacancy in the pit of my stomach makes me feel as if the majority of my molecules were left behind in some kind of space-time continuum. Maybe humans aren’t meant to travel 500mph and cross oceans in a day. Maybe I should turn back now to collect myself while there’s still a chance to reverse time, stop time, hold time hostage and let it up only when I figure out which direction I’m supposed to go? Answer the questions no one seems to know?
Like,
How can you let someone you love leave without saying goodbye?
Why do hurt people hurt people?
and,
Is “sorry” really enough to forgive?

I take the first exit, and wind through the canyon roads in the outskirts of Sedona. Red rock and blue sky burn into my tired eyes. I find an empty road and drive until there’s no more road. There’s space here in the sky and in the dirt to scatter all of the pieces of myself that tagged along to see if there’s enough to keep going.

Out here lives a kind of silence so profound it echoes inside itself. There’s a buzzing in your ears. A bee-sting silence. Yet another endangered species.

No work can be done here without breaking its fragility, so instead, I climb up the biggest boulder I can find and take in the view. I pull off my shirt and lie half-naked on heated granite, skin pressed to stone, breast against bone. I run my fingers over the contours of rough rock the same way I traced the freckles on your back, trying to memorize them as if they were constellations in the sky. 

For a heartbeat, we let our seemingly impenetrable shells crumble. We held mirrors up to each other, and revealed that you and me? We are not so different after all. Sheep in wolves’ clothes. Kids grappling with adult woes.

And if I knew then what I know now: that the people I least expect will hurt me in the most unimaginable ways; that I will be left with nothing tangible to point to except two letters the addressees will never read because one of them is dead. The other, gone.

I’d still go. 

Because to find those words, the few thousand, I knocked myself out on on cold, hard ground until my shell ruptured. Until my ribs cracked wide open. Until blood spilled to ink on the page. I poured myself into pieces of paper so I could come out here, alone— all one— and hold them up for scale.

I tried to calculate things like how vulnerability measures up to bravery, what the density is between fragility and fear, and how long it takes for hardness to transform into softness.

For the first, I place vulnerability a notch above bravery, because to be brave means you have something to gain, but to be vulnerable means you have everything to lose.

For the second, I remark they feel about the same.

For the third, I decide it has to sit here like this rock, absorbing sun, sky, rain, for a million billion years, until it breaks down into infinitely smaller pieces. Until it’s almost invisible, almost forgettable. Until it’s sand between your toes. 

My final answer is that my time is nothing against this time. 

I don’t know it yet, but I’ll keep moving north. I’ll climb up snow-covered mountaintops while my ski boots chafe against the fresh cut on my ankle. The sun will set. I’ll keep going. Someone will help me carry the weight on my back. Another will ask if I’m okay. My evening will be filled with laughter, twisted ankles, and Vermouth to soothe the pain.

Months later, a friend will ask me if I found resolution. I’ll tell her I don’t know what it sounds like but I think I know what it feels like: heat on bare skin and clean air in your lungs. That resurrection is an assemblage of ingredients accumulated one day at a time, chipping away at the boulder beneath your body until it breaks down and becomes sand between your toes.

Time is the antidote, I’ll tell her. Don’t cry wolf. Just wait.