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All the things I could never give him.
This heat is something else. Look at how I’m just rambling. I’m not like this, this…hot mess. It will all feel better, inside my head and my skin, when the sun sets. But, I don’t want to be up here when it gets dark. I should probably start heading back.
Inertia is a crazy damn thing. I keep hiking higher up the mountain, deeper into the woods, then through sunny clearings, and more woods. I feel it all in my legs as I gain elevation.
I know this path. I’ve hiked it a dozen or more times with Bennett. He bought land up there. Bennett had big giant plans for those ten acres. He’d need to clear it and then build on it, a house and a shop and a two-acre pond. Maybe a barn we could fill up with animals. We spent so many hours, days, nights, walking together up and down that still-wild acreage, mapping it out, seeing things that weren’t there, somehow at the very same time.
Did he do it? Did all of his wildest dreams come true? I have to know.
And that’s it, I realize. That’s why I’m here. It isn’t only nostalgic whimsy, although that’s part of it. I have to see what came of it all. I know what came of me, of us. Hopefully it’s better. It has to be better.
Bennett did better. Even without me.
Is this it? The sun is pulled lower into the sky as if lassoed by the ether. The whole ground is beginning to move. The trees sway, unnaturally. I blink. I blink, again, harder. It feels like I’m spinning. Or the mountains are spinning, or both. Round and round we go. And then it feels like I’m falling.
And then my back is against the hard, dry earth.
All goes dark. The trees, the mountains, even the sun. Gone. Who knows for how long.
I feel suddenly jostled. It isn’t uncomfortable. Where is the ground? Am I flying, did I just die?
My eyes open. The vision is blurry, twin images swimming toward one another, and after I blink a couple of times, they become one. My vision clears, satisfyingly, like that little picture they make you look at at the optometrist’s office. It’s a man. And over his shoulder he’s holding me against…I see a house.
And both man and house are definitely not butt-ugly.
