It was my favorite spot, next to the fallen tree over
the creek. Even though it wasn’t quite ten minutes walk from the dormitories, I
had never until then known anyone else to go back into the woods there. The
paths, as far as I could tell, were maintained by the groundskeepers, but the
student body had largely abandoned them over the course of years. Not even the
stoners or the drunks ever wandered in that direction - besides the creek and a
multitude of trees, after all, there wasn’t much there. To the extent that the
occasional beer-can could be seen in the creekbed, the metal containers were
old, decayed, and algae-draped; one could easily pretend they were just part of
the scenery.
I went there often in those days, it was the only place
I could stand to be that was quiet and no-one would bother me. I could think,
unobstructed, except for the obstructions I put in front of myself. Even in the
January chill, with a dusting of snow scattered among the dead stalks of the
undergrowth, I would still occasionally go there to sit. Until her, I was never
interrupted, though on some dark and gloomy days I would wish fervently that
someone would chance by. As you can probably guess, this is her story more than
it is mine. I’m the worst person in the world to tell it, but then again no-one
else can.
I was surprised to hear soft footfalls on the path
behind me on that clear day in April, cautious in a way that made me know their
owner was trying to be quiet, not to catch my attention. This effort was of course
hopeless - the sound of feet on the earth and leaves of the path stood out
against the bird-calls and sound of water more starkly than an alarm clock’s
harsh sound stands out in the mind when it pierces a dream.
I turned my head and body just slightly, wondering who
it was that had come this far into the woods, expecting it to be one of my
‘friends’ who’d followed me to play a childish prank at the worst possible
time. The slim girl in the blue windbreaker was not at all what I was expecting
- I knew instantly that she was not among my peers at the university, though
she was about my age, maybe a year or two older. She was looking at her feet,
trying intently to steer them clear of the driest leaves and twigs on the path
to keep quiet, and didn’t notice me watching her for several seconds.
When she did finally look up, she started, then winced,
when I met her gaze. Her eyes were a clear green, even from twenty feet away
they were striking. It was clear she thought she was intruding in something,
and though she was I realized I didn’t mind. I could tell right away that she
wasn’t here to drag me back to a life of buzzing cell phones, arguments over
project work, combinatorial algebra, physics, and research papers. Whoever she
was, she walked the paths for her own reasons, and I could respect that. With a
slight nod, I turned back toward the creek, expecting her to continue down the
path.
She didn’t, though. Her footfalls stopped at the path’s
closest point to the stone on which I sat, and I strained to hear any hint of
what she was doing, the train of thought for which I had come to the spot
entirely forgotten. Even a sideways glance had told me she was attractive, the
sort of girl who would never notice my existence in the presence of anyone
else. That she was standing behind me somewhere should have made me nervous,
except the train of thought had been interrupted at one of its darkest points,
and I didn’t really have the energy for nervousness.
“You all right?” She eventually asked. Care for my
well-being was not what I had expected, so I turned around fully. She was still
standing there, hands in the pockets of her light coat, though the air was,
while not warm, also not cold enough to make one’s hands uncomfortably cold.
I shrugged. I knew that any attempt to explain what had
driven me out here to think would be either hideously long-winded or so abrupt
as to make me sound dangerously insane. “Not really.” I admitted after a second
or two.
She smiled a little. I wondered briefly if there was
something about the situation that was upturning my usual social pariah status.
“If you’re trying to hide it you aren’t doing that great a job.” She pointed
out, and took a few steps closer.
“That’s the point.” I turned back to look at the creek,
at first meaning this to end the conversation rather abruptly, but I continued
after a second’s pause, almost despite myself. “Out here, there’s no point
pretending. No facades. Just the cold, brutal truth. That’s my rule.” I
wondered why I was telling her - she likely didn’t really care that much, she
was just being polite. I respected the effort, at least. Rarely did anyone make
it.
“Ah.” She probably nodded, but I wasn’t facing her so I
didn’t see. “So if I asked what was bothering you you’d tell me?”
I wondered again what her motivations were. Nobody just
expressed interest in the problems of a stranger. Still, I answered in kind.
“Well there’s nothing in the rule that says I have to answer. But there’s no
point in lying.”
“No point?” She echoed, turning my almost defeatist
statement into a query. “That’s probably the worst reason to tell the truth
I’ve ever heard.”
I shrugged, still facing away from her. “I don’t have a
better one, sorry.”
She offered a noncommittal sound that was the verbal
equivalent of a shrug, and then was silent for several moments, but no
footsteps indicated her departure. Eventually, I turned around fully, and gave
the girl an inquisitive look. “Are you going to ask, then?” I prompted.
“Er...” She shrugged. “You said you wouldn’t answer.” A
breeze blew past, rustling the partially-leaved branches of the trees, and
blowing a few strands of her brownish hair into her face. She pushed them
behind one ear before continuing. “I wasn’t going to.”
I shook my head and smiled thinly. “I said I didn’t have
to, not that I wouldn’t. I can’t honestly tell you right now if I will answer
any question, even that one.” It all came down, of course, to whether my desire
to get the morose thoughts bouncing about in my head out into the open, even
the open between myself and a total stranger, defeated my desire to keep the
darker recesses of my mind from ever affecting anyone but me. Usually it wasn’t
even a contest, but something about this girl gave a second wind to the former
urge. I didn’t figure out what it was until later. “Besides, you’re still
standing there.”
She frowned, as the concept of not knowing what I would
do even ten seconds in the future was probably as foreign to her as it is to
the reader. “How can you not know whether or not you’d answer? Can’t you just
decide one way or the other?”
I shrugged. “Not as such. I can decide which I want to
do, but that rarely has any bearing on what happens.” I realized what she’d
done after I had finished speaking. “Touché. Well played.”
She stepped back and looked surprised, as I’d
interrupted the process of her brain analyzing my words. “What did I do?”
I sighed. “You got me to answer without asking the
direct question.”
She seemed to be confused at this for several moments,
but then her furrowed-brow expression of confusion cleared, and it seemed that
the sun came out from behind a cloud at that exact instant. “Oh! That’s what’s
bothering you.” Only then did she seem to go back and process my actual answer,
and the confused look came back weakly. “That doesn’t make any sense, you
know.”
“It does, but only if you don’t overdo your
assumptions.” I pointed out. At least, it made sense to me. I had to make sense
of it, after all - modifying the theory to fit the facts. I certainly couldn’t
change the problem by looking at it differently - believe me, I’d tried.
Rather, I’d altered my worldview to fit the dismal facts, and in so doing I had
to throw away basic things other people take for granted.
“Sorry, I have to assume you aren’t a robot.” She took
two steps forward to lean on a small tree that stood very close to the path.
“People choose their own actions. It’s called free will.”
“Exactly.” I leaned over and picked up an acorn resting
next to the rock I was sitting on. “I can’t think of a time I’ve actually been
able to choose. Sure, I am the one performing the actions, but there’s only
ever one real option.” I rolled the acorn between my fingers abstractly. “Even
now, if I wanted to stop talking to you I wouldn’t have a choice.”
“But do you want to?” She asked, leaning her head back
and looking up at the sun beyond the trees.
“If I didn’t want to talk, I’d still have to answer that
I did.” And in fact, many times before I had agreed enthusiastically to do
things that internally I very much was against doing. “I figure it’s a little
fairer if I tell you that before saying that I do very much prefer this
conversation to sitting out here alone.” I actually did want to talk, because
she seemed interested enough, because I’d never had so honest a conversation in
my life, and honestly because my chances of even exchanging hellos with a girl
like her under normal circumstances were so low as to be statistically
insignificant. I’ve always been small, frail-looking, the sort of guy with so
little muscle mass that the widest portion of my arms is my elbows, and a
lifetime of keeping my head down had left me with an ingrained slouching
posture that I knew was beyond unattractive. I guessed that she had to be
holding up her end of the conversation only because I was in some way providing
novelty, or because she was looking to put the problems that had brought her to
the paths into perspective against my own.
“So, you don’t want to talk?” She frowned. “I can - “
I shook my head and waved away the partially-stated offer.
“Not what I meant. Only that because we are talking, there’s no way I would
answer that question with no.” This didn’t seem to clear things up for her, so
I held up the acorn in my hand. “Look at it this way. You can’t tell if I want
to throw this into the creek or not, but I am going to.” I turned around
halfway and tossed the nut into the water, where it landed with a quiet plunk
sound and bobbed downstream. “It doesn’t matter whether or not I wanted to do
that. I did it, so you can assume I wanted to.” Actually, leaving my hands
without something to roll around nervously, I immediately wished I hadn’t
thrown the acorn, as I found myself with two hands that weren’t doing anything
and felt much better if they were.
The girl nodded slowly. “I get it. I think. But it does
matter what you want, you know.”
“Why?” I queried simply.
“Because if you do things you don’t like to do it makes
you miserable.”
“And why does me being miserable matter?”
“Because...” She struggled with an answer. “You don’t
deserve to be.”
“You’ve been talking to me about three minutes.” I
pointed out. “And you’ve got enough information to know what I deserve?”
“You are hardly an axe murderer.” She replied testily.
I smiled a little. “Only on Mondays.” The joke was
hideously bad and my delivery was off, and I immediately regretted attempting
to jest while in as dark a mood as I was in.
She gave a little chuckling sound, though, which made me
inwardly wonder - the joke would have gotten a strange look from most, perhaps
a slight polite smile. That she’d found enough there to chuckle made me wonder
if she was just humoring me, condescending down to the monkey pretending to be
human.
Seeing that if she was indeed condescending to me, then
the damage was done, I pressed on. “I try to avoid trains of thought focusing
on the words ‘deserve’ and ‘fair’, mostly because that way lies self-pity,
which fixes nothing.”
“That makes sense. Although, if you are miserable, won’t
you make the people around you miserable? Won’t that matter?”
This was a good question, but one that I had long
discovered an answer to. “If I were to broadcast how I felt about anything,
yes. I could well make other people miserable. But a cheerful expression is
fairly easy.”
“Can’t your friends see through that?” She pointed out.
“Maybe.” I conceded. “Though it’s been a long time since
anyone was close enough to want to. I’ve been at this a long time. It’s easy to
keep people just far enough away.”
“I see.” She said without emotion, and did not follow
up. But neither did she leave. The silence, punctuated only by the rustle of
the breeze and the sound of the creek, stretched for several long seconds.
“How about you?” I finally asked, feeling that it was
expected of me. “What has you walking the paths?”
“Something tells me you won’t believe I’m here for the
scenery.” She replied.
I shook my head. “Sorry, no. But you don’t have to
answer if you don’t want to. Only fair.”
She nodded. “I came out here to put my mind off some
things.”
The answer was vague, but out of courtesy I didn’t press
specifics. “Hiding from your own thoughts?” I simplified. “That’s easier to do
with other people around.”
“Yeah.” Her shoulders shrugged underneath the blue coat.
“I didn’t catch your name, by the way.”
‘My name?’ I’m sure this degree of curiosity shocked me
enough for it to show on my face. She wanted my name? I panicked. This had to
be a joke, this had to be something my so-called friends had put her up to.
What good was my name otherwise? I balked at the idea of telling her.
“You didn’t.” I finally replied after several seconds.
“And I didn’t catch yours. Even trade.”
Rather than getting annoyed and stalking off, she agreed
with a faint nod. “Just as well. Monday’s coming.”
I forced myself to smile realistically, but I knew
something was wrong. Something was not right. The whole thing was too good to
be true, and I knew it, but a rehydrated hope from deep in my mind kept me from
blowing her off. What if I was wrong?
“Look.” I said. “I won’t press. You want your mind off it.” I picked up
a pebble from near my foot to fill the void in my hands, which had become
maddening.
“It all right if I ask you a question?” She asked, not
missing a beat.
“That was one. But yes.” I waved off the miled pedantry.
“Same rules apply, though.”
“I think you’ll answer.” She sounded confident. I was
curious as to what her question was, and I think she could tell - she let that
hang in the air for several seconds before continuing. “What does it feel like
to be so completely alone, and to know you have no-one to blame but yourself?”
I nodded, not defeated, but outmaneuvered. I saw that I
had no choice but to answer, and saw that she was going to follow this up, but
could not put a stop to it. “Not at all good.” I admitted. “I haven’t really
seen it as an option, but I can empathize with that guy who blew his own brains
out across campus last year.”
She nodded - apparently, despite not being a student at
the university, she had heard about that. “And now I know.”
“Yes.”
“And my mental state, in your worldview, matters - I’m
not you.”
“I have to assume it matters more. You’re a person, you
have free will.”
“Then why did you tell me any of this? Why did you
answer?”
“I wanted to.” I insisted. “But that’s not why.
Completely separate. Tell you the truth I don’t know the reasons.”
“Maybe because you’re honest out here what you want
actually matters?” She could sense her victory, now, though I had many moves
before.
“That’s not it. Something is - ”
She laughed. It was a nice sound and a terrible one,
with high notes - the sort of laugh a Renaissance noble-woman would use to
declare victory over a rival. The rest of my sentence, “Something is different,
something is wrong” died under that sound’s withering hail of darts. “If only
my problems were so easy. Bye now.”
“Wait.” I got up as she turned to continue on her way.
“I have to figure out what’s - ”
The woods quaked, and time slowed to a crawl. I tried to
grab hold of her arm anyway, but time slowed her down too, and she didn’t seem
to notice me reaching out. Something told me that if I got a hold of her, and
we talked this out, I could figure it out, but it was like the air had become
thick, dark, purplish clay, hard to push through. Slower and slower and -
Story continues in part 2 (here).
