“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.
Amen.”
Matthew 6:9-13
King James Bible.
This is the only biblical prayer I have ever memorized.
These days, a literal interpretation of the line about trespassing tends to bring to mind the image of the “posted” signs at the edge of the woods where I frequently wandered alone at the beginning of the pandemic. I think of the woods often. It also reminds me of a quote from Aldo Leopold that C_____ told me about, once – something about a county clerks office, I can’t remember it verbatim but I’ve still got the gist of it somewhere.
I returned to the woods, recently, with a backpack and a map and compass, a flip phone and a bear canister, a tent and a bedroll, layers for hiking and sleeping and staying warm, a cheap water filtration system, and copious amounts of bug spray. This was the last hurrah for the boots I bought in the summer of 2019. They have served me well.
Time in the woods made me think of the man with blue eyes. Like being haunted by a ghost I’m a little afraid of, a ghost I haven’t let myself think about in years.
I remember – I was 19, and there was a man that summer with strikingly blue eyes who wanted to take me backpacking and also refused to take me backpacking unless I bought a good pair of boots. If I only focus on that memory, and ignore nearly all of the other memories of the way he made me feel, then I can look back on the boy who talked me into buying the boots with a numb kind of fondness.
I’m pretty sure my mother was trying to marry me off, at the time, which would have been one way to get me out of the house. I’m not sure what possessed her, of all people, my overprotective mother with her morbid imagination, to sit back and smile and allow me to ride off into the sunrise and hike for miles alone in the woods with a man that I did not know. With no complaints at all, from her.
Still, I followed him – with a blind and unassuming sort of trust. I watched him filter water from the pond, cook over a camp stove, navigate trails, I watched him make jokes about seeing bears in the woods that I didn’t understand because nobody had ever in their entire lives bothered to explain anything whatsoever to me at all and I was the worst possible combination of sheltered and not very bright.
We spent a lot of time in the woods.
I think I did something quite melodramatic, when he left – or was it me who left first, I don’t remember – like I think I swore to myself that I would never love again. Because getting attached to him, letting him get close to me, and only knowing one way of staying close to him, even when at times I didn’t want to, which was to fight like hell to keep the dying embers alive in the middle of the rain – that hurt me. I was keenly aware that it was hurting him, too.
But the fire metaphor is a good one. Whatever it was we had burned bright and fast and used up all of its fuel in the process.
Fire can also be a transformative thing, part of the life cycle of a landscape. I have never been the same after him.
I have wanted to love.
I have, until recently, kept my promise to myself – the never loving again thing.
I have let myself entertain all kinds of half-loves. Pathetically yearning at perfectly wonderful people in secret from a distance for too many years without saying a god damned thing has perhaps been the safest, the kindest, and the most psychologically devestating compromise. Kissing attractive and very obviously emotionally unavailable people has been a close second. The worst was letting people who liked me very much have my time and my affection, but not letting myself be in love because I expected to get burned.
–
then there was my fiancé, who approached me with a shy and yet charming straightforward directness at exactly the right moment and told me he found me attractive, he couldn’t stop thinking about me, and he would never speak of this again if I thought he was crazy for misreading the signs – and who shortly thereafter received a surprised but encouraging answer that I did not think he was crazy. As if he had not been one of the people I had felt safe yearning for because I thought I couldn’t have him.
–
I think what I did in response to getting burned was this: I locked my ability to fall in love away inside of something like a tomb, threw away the key, and let myself forget that anything had ever been locked away, and then wondered why everything hurt so much all the time.
Nobody else could ever really have a key to that lock, not really. It would be enchanting to think that key could ever belong to someone else, some fatefully trusted person. But it can’t belong to anyone else. It’s only ever been mine.
Sovereinty.
I swore to myself that I would never fall in love again until I was ready, knowing that I probably never would be.
It was a cruel and nonsensical thing to do, a kindness, an act of self preservation, a specific kind of violence towards the self – all at the same time. It was also fundamentally confused, because fighting like hell to keep dying embers from going out in the wind and the rain is not the same thing as being in love. For fuck’s sake. I wish I could tell them that.
There was never a lock.
There was never a key.
There was barely even a love story with a bitter ending.
There was only a sad teenager who had hurt someone she liked and been hurt quite badly in return, and did not know what to do with the grief except to try very hard never go near the source, not ever again, not ever.
And there was only ever going to be a slow and painful and confusing recovery, mostly without telling a damned soul.
