A stolen keychain jingles in the ignition and thwacks against my thumb and my eyes are coated in mucus and my body is more sore than ever, because my brain is attacking me with an intense, physical sort of violence. I have never hurt all over like this. I could still turn around. I can salvage this.
Fuck you. I don't care. I don't care.
I care so much. I could still turn around. I can salvage this.
My world is this: the air conditioning is on and my fur is on fire and it's begun to drizzle outside. Grand Rapids is long behind me and Max's hatchback drives a cool sixty on freeway, but of course I'm past freeways now, I'm lost in the winding highways and plains and, eventually, forests, leading north past Ludington and Scottville. Little transitory roads and incessant bending turns that ask you to slow down to twenty miles per hour. And when the road asks me to turn rapidly like this I freeze up and have to park at a standstill—it has been over two years since I've had to drive for any reason and I am absolutely terrified of how easy it would be to screw up. Make a little tiny mistake and explode. I don't know where I'm going. I never found out where His house was, out there in the woods. And it is that broken stupid magical thinking that is causing me to assume that I will just find it on my own, if I drive long enough, surely it will turn up. It has to. I need to get out of this car so that I stop apologizing in my head, sorry Max, sorry Max, sorry Max, I will leave your phone in the car and get GPS coordinates and I will text them to your sister and then maybe someday a thousand years from now you will forgive me. You will say, yes, it is your fault. But you were dumb and lonely and you just made a rash decision. You'd take it back if you could. I forgive you. It's okay. It's all going to be okay.
I'm crying again just on instinct and I can't grip the steering wheel any tighter.
Fuck you. Grinding my teeth. Hate this.
Just two headlights in the dark.
I roll over a pothole and the car shifts and my seat goes rickety and right now all I want to do is scream, just scream, because I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to be put into this situation. This is an agony which can't be quenched by anything except a method to escape. It's moods like this that make you prone to cutting your own head off.
I took a road called the Ninety-Six out of Grand Rapids and got on the Thirty-One. Now it's darker and darker and the headlights aren't working as well and I turned the high beams on because I haven't seen a driver in half an hour. Now the roads don't have numbers, they have names. Rows and rows and rows of names and bookshelves and I am diving into the woods. I remember that His house was quite far from the shore but not that far, somewhere embedded in the many tertiary veins of the state. Very far north of Grand Rapids when I went there for the first time. Is it this turn? This turn? I am going to go insane and start seeing spots. When am I going to pass another car?
Pothole.
Ba-thump.
Rabbit.
I slam the brake with all my might and swerve and nearly careen off the road, and I let out a weak, warbly squeal, because I nearly hit the thing. Just a little rabbit crossing the road. It's so dark. I am halfway across the left lane crying my eyes out and the high beams illuminate a pine tree half scratched up by bears. I could have died just now. Crashed and had to wander back to civilization. Worse for wear again.
Or I could have killed a little rabbit that did not want to be part of my mess.
If I keep driving like this I'm going to crash.
Actually the reason things get so bad is much more stupid. I do not crash Max's car, I run out of gas. He was going to fill it up in the morning. I did not check the gauge.
Park by a ditch. Send that message to his sister's phone.
Start walking.
It is three o'clock. The roads have numbers again but the numbers don't mean anything. Five two five nine and five oh three eight. And so on.
In spots I forget about Him. I will find myself walking for five or ten minutes not thinking about anything at all and then I'll remember Him and yelp out, and my legs will grow tired again, and then the darkness seeps into me; it is a half moon out and only the bare minimum of light to keep walking remains. I will forget Him soon, or maybe it just feels like it. I am going delirious to the point of sickness. I want to be somebody else.
And this is maybe what it is all about.
I have been running from my own life for as long as I can remember. I could have salvaged this but I was handed an out, I was handed something nicer than just fucking dealing with it. I was an online furry because the sensory and loving world of anthropomorphization treated me a lot better than the real world of labor and punishment and abuse and disconnect. As an online furry I could tell people I liked them and I liked being around them. I did not have to be so ludicrously alone because I was allowed to dream a little bit, to imagine and manifest the reality of being happy.
I would like to say that this whole mess has been about the concept of 'fantasy.' It has affected me in a very grave way as of late and now it is making me walk in one direction down a rural road in Michigan until I die.
It is likely that the world will forget me. And Max, too. And it is very likely the world will forget Him, because He was already fast on His way to that point. But I have started to not be so afraid of this fact. When things fall through the world, it is like they reach an ideal, a sort of afterlife of ideas; places like the Red Shack and Lone Star Lanes and the spot and, of course, all the parking lots, and transitory highways, and all the old rooms in old houses, and commercials, and garbage on the side of the road. All of it in a big pile for once. All in harmony. I have felt a kinship with things that get forgotten. I don't feel like it was ever fair to treat them as completely less than human.
After all, we get forgotten plenty, too.
As a kid I read a book—this one is famous, too, you have probably read it—called Where The Wild Things Are. It is, in summary, a story about a kid wandering into the wilderness and getting forgotten by the world. He finds a bunch of monsters who take care of him when nothing else does.
In the end he makes his way back home too. But I didn't like that part.
I never wanted to come back.
When I got forgotten by the world, He welcomed me through His front door. And for all the stupid bullshit in-between then and now, I have never lost that sense of touch, of His hands against mine for the first time, of His insistence that fantasy can be reality, and that it is not stupid to want an experience that is an unalloyed good. It is His tendency to want things to be perfect. Anything less is a mistake.
Some people have said life is about misery but I think they can eat shit. Life is about warmth.
Wind picks up.
The gravel is sharp on my feet.
My breath is getting very heavy now and I wasn't expecting it to, but I have been walking a very long time and my gait is a little hunched and a little unoptimized and I'm aching all over as a result. And of course I didn't have the time or intention to make food before I left, because I was not hungry, but now I am once again so hungry. I would kill somebody for a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich. And water.
Some water, please. Throat is drying up and cracking.
I haven't seen a car since I delved into the trees and now I can hardly see the road at all, all bits of gravel and dirt scattered piecemeal. I am weaving in-between places that may have once been owned property but are now just mazelike corridors through the wilderness; there are sometimes metal signs telling me where I am but they are few and far between. But I know now, better than I did on the night I left, that I could take a few specific turns and reach a house owned by somebody. In record pace I could be somewhere warm begging someone else for a few minutes of shelter, please, please, a few minutes.
Please, please, warm me up. It's getting so cold. I've never known windchill like this. The drizzle has stopped but now it's just freezing and all the heat from yesterday has finally gone.
I could go back.
I should go back.
Turn around.
I could salvage this.
I can salvage this says a voice in a plastic container for mints buried in the bottom of a purse worn by a chunk of granite falling into the waves; there's peace in the waves and peace in the sinking and there's peace in the sea floor. I have a terrible relationship with my mind and my memory, the part of me that keeps insisting that I can salvage this, because I have been through this before. Many times I have been thirsty and starving and cold and I have, many times, considered killing myself. Sometimes it is playful and sometimes it is not playful at all. And in spite of how I feel about my memory, it has been the thing that has saved me from complete destruction.
I owe it very much and I hate it. I hate how much I have put on my memory's shoulders as of late. All this time forgetting and remembering and trying desperately not to avoid the subject of Him, and this disconnect has made me feel like a thousand disparate ceramic pieces scattered on the ground. Maybe it is better not to ask what I want but what I need.
My body needs to survive and my brain doesn't.
I am two. I am in superposition.
In this way I set myself up to be locked in these cycles of frustration; I cannot simultaneously be safe in His presence and I also cannot be happy anymore without His touch. I absolutely must have answers about what He does to me at night and if we sleep for multiple nights, but I absolutely cannot have these answers, because they are very harmful for me. As He said. And it is true in the worst of ways—it made me walk out and run out and run away and now where am I?
Where am I?
and memory responds, I know.
I know.
I know this road.
Tufts of weedery reach out above the ditches on either side, and a tree curls over the road, and the sun is starting to come up, now, and I can see the expanse as it rolls gently downhill. I can see spots where the rains dug into the road and turned it all into a river of mud, and I can also see the small bits of gravel that remain. I can see a cut-out in the forest far away and off to the left.
The sun crawls over the horizon at pace.
I remember when I drove to His house for the very time. I don't remember if it was on purpose but it was certainly not an accident, and although I cannot say that I remember what happened to my car I do remember what happened to me. I got out and I saw His house in its grandeur and something whispered into me and said that it was alright, it was okay, there will be warmth inside.
Warmth.
Warmth is very close to love.
The road is bordered by trees taller than imagination and, in large part, downhill. Down and down and sinking. When I turn left I am greeted with wilderness so winding and terrifying in the half-light that my heart nearly gives out, but the incessant coldness in my fur keeps me moving forward anyway. The will is a very sad thing and ought to make you sad, the way it keeps trudging on. At this point my left foot is so scratched up by gravel that it's bleeding and I need to limp to get anywhere, and I'm holding my arms around myself for any sense of comfort but there is none.
At the end of this road is His house or nothing. At the end of this road is life or death.
It curls through hills and mud and underbrush and in spots the road is so damp with collapsed branches that there is no way not to cut myself up on brambles, and I am hurrying now, scurrying through pain and limping as I jog, and I just need Him, I need His presence, please, please, please. Just a minute. Just a few more seconds of His touch. I am so sorry that I am doing this to myself. I can still go back. I can salvage this. Over another tree trunk I faceplant and fall into a patch of mud and a half-dissolved puddle and keep waiting to feel Him on the back of my neck but I am still alone. Going on. Going on.
I made it during the storms and I can make it now, I can make it. I can go back. I need Him. I yelp out. Sun is coming up. I should be waking up soon. My shift is early. Only a few minutes now and I can still make it I can
finally
see
His house.
It is at this point that I am almost completely disconnected from my body or reality or emotion and so I simply walk forward until I reach the front courtyard which has been torn apart by rain and wind and collapsing trees, and the power line along the west wing has been repaired, and His house looks so large from here. Sixty stories tall and miles in every direction and still utterly Euclidean and please be real, please be real. No sensation on the back of my spine. Do you know I'm thinking about you?
I step onto a patch of thorns and jitter and contort and limp all the way to the front steps which are slick with mud and then I reach the front doors and I try the handle but the door is locked.
Please.
And I try knocking. And again. And pounding, and pounding, and please do not have fallen through the world. I will step through the doors and find an empty house and I imagined it, I imagined it, the world forgot Him and I will forget Him again, I will forget Him as I always knew I would. I will forget Him. Please.
Please. I'm so sorry—I didn't mean to forget you. It was my fault, I'm so sorry. Please.
Please let me come back.
I'm so sorry.
Pounding and pounding and pounding and the door comes open slowly
please
but He is not the one opening the door. Somebody else undid the lock and creaked the door open just far enough to see me and for me to see him. He is a man my height with short horns and a pronounced, rounded snout. I am sure I recognize him. And he is moving his muzzle as if to speak. Calling back inside for somebody else.
In His house there is this dazzling quality to the first room from the front doors, called the welcome room; the arches curve magnificently to a ceiling on either side and give a unique sensation of freakish grandeur, as if you are embedded in a very large chest cavity. Still as the woodwork approaches the ceiling it develops into a web of snakes, all polished and varnished oak and ebony where the lamplight along either wall doesn't reach. And there is a great white-and-gold rug sixteen feet across which heaps praise upon you, which has been thrown on the hardwood so as to make it feel expansive and like home. In the corners there are statues of faces hardly human, and along each wall there are small tables set up to display amphoras and electronics and sculptures defying space, and there are things mounted on the walls unspeakable, but—most importantly—in front of you there are two great big black lacquered doors, heavy as hell, which insist that there is something fantastical beyond. It takes a good bit of pushing but they will always give way.