And, the story goes . . . I awake before the dawn, waiting for the creases of sun to fold up the blackness. I feel the crawling of my skin and the squirming of my heart. Another day in the woods. Life here is like a permanent state of repairing, like a nail being driven or like me being nailed.
Roaming these last few days until the sky overlaps my path with dark, I am left with my legs cut, my arms itchy and my ears buzzing with the noise of the woods. The land around me is chipper with life. As the wind tosses around bird trills and swells with activity, it whips a deep reminder toward me that I am here.
How can a place full of life be so empty? Where does emptiness come from? I suppose God spoke it into existence when He was throwing out words to create the heavens and the earth. Did He know that people would use emptiness to ride the ebb and flow of loneliness or to grasp the true meaning of devastation?
My stomach is empty. My heart is empty. My soul is empty.
These are the ideas I’ve had to get used to.
As I linger in the furrows of early morn, I wonder if I will venture forth today as I have been doing, day after day, into the vacant woods. No matter, for a moment, I am happy to be drifting in and out of this place.
“What would it take for you to believe?”
My moment is cut off by his voice. I sit up, only able to make out a shadow in the murky, early, woodsy morning.
“You know, I wonder sometimes what it would take for you to believe me.” He says again.
I watch the figure, and of course I know that something happened between us after I gave him my story. The story didn’t depress him and in life there are few stories where something happens that doesn’t depress the reader. And it was as if his reading my story proved that I am real, that I exist, just as much as emptiness exists and is real.
So I watch him, but remain unsure.
He walks toward me to where I sit on the ground. The sun is beginning to empty its smocked rays onto his face.
“Maybe . . .” I begin and my words halt his steps while he is still a way off. “If you could help me get out of these woods.”
He says nothing. I’ve asked too much.
“Or maybe if you could just give me a hug once in a while and tell me I’m going to be okay.”
“You think that would change things?”
I hang my head, unable to answer because I know the answer . . . of course, for a while, never . . . because that’s how the story goes.
