Carved

You follow your toddlers through the woods behind your home, just as you remember your own mother doing with you a very short twenty-something years ago. At the time, the woods seemed to be full of magic. Trees that felt so tall, they cloaked the sky with their leaves, a snapping branch in the distance that could mean friend or foe — you were destined to find out either way, of course, — and a brook babbling with no distinct start or end, so much so that it let your childhood imagination decide it had to start or end somewhere absolutely remarkable.

The woods aren’t magical anymore, though. Now all they give you is scraped ankles and the occasional tick bite; hopefully today it’s the latter. The one thing the woods have had in common all these years is the small benefit of reprieve it offers the moment you cross the threshold from your backyard through the tree line.

This isn’t the life you imaged for yourself, no. You were supposed to get out of this town, see the world, try new foods, meet exotic people. Buying, — scratch that, inheriting, — your parent’s house at the ripe age of 23 because you were pregnant, broke, and had nowhere to go, had not been in the cards for you. They wanted to downsize anyways, they told you. It made all the sense in the world and the timing was impeccable. How lucky were you!

You knew it then, and you know it now. You absolutely hate this house. Loathe it, really. The same floorboards you tried to avoid when you were a teen, the ones that creaked loud enough to wake your father out of the deepest of slumbers, creak with memories you will yourself to forget. Your father screaming at your mother, your sister crying on the bathroom floor, and the occasional sound of a fist connecting with flesh to name a few. The wallpaper peels away from the walls and the popcorn ceiling litters the floor just as it had when you were a kid, as if the house itself was having a breakdown from the turmoil inside of it.

Don’t become your parents! they always told you.

Oh, don’t worry, I absolutely will not! was always your reply.

But somehow, along the way, your path and future you always planned for yourself got twisted into the shape of a big fat U, turning you right back into the direction you left. You fear, as well as you know, your life has become the reality you escaped. You rub your fingers against a fresh bruise on your chin, still swollen and warm to the touch. You don’t normally wear make-up on your days off, but nowadays, it was becoming a necessity. What was that phrase that you heard in grade school? History repeats itself. You look down at your torn up ankles and the stubborn baby weight that still clings to you. A walking museum exhibit.

So for now, you will continue to trail behind your children, with a swollen jaw and belly, a third on the way (how lucky were we!), the woods acting as a time machine, transporting you back to that time that was oh so sweet. Back to when you didn’t know that your parents fighting would cause you any sort of tribulation, when you thought your moms bruises meant that she was the clumsiest woman in the world, and when the track marks on your sisters arms were just a bug bite she couldn’t stop scratching.

You watch your children walk alongside the brook, occasionally stopping to dip their hands in and feel the water rush through their fingers, no doubt searching for that beginning or end that you found yourself searching for throughout your childhood. To them, the brook may seem wide, vast, and mysterious, but to you, it’s a small stream of water and a whole lot of memories. You feel your heart rate slow with each twig that tears another hole in your skin, and each little bit of distance you put between yourself and your parents’ house you now own where you know he is, waiting for you.

The woods provide the kind of silence and sense of calm you couldn’t quite find anywhere else, which you welcome after living in that house for a collective of 27 years. You let your eyes wander; you know you’ll hear them if they fall in to the water.

Your eyes catch on a piece of bark on a tree trunk. Something in you triggers a memory, but one you can’t quite put your finger on. With one last glance at your kids, you make your way to the tree, through the brush and bushes in your path. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

You run your fingers over the incongruous pattern in bark, worn by the growth and natural elements. If you hadn’t carved it yourself, you wouldn’t be able to make out what the letters were.

There, carved in the bark is your initials next to another, a jagged heart around the perimeter of them. The initials next to yours is the person you know was your first, and maybe only, true love. If legible to anyone, the initials could mean anything and nothing all the same.

But these initials — L.L. — didn’t mean nothing. They meant everything. Lacey Long. You close your eyes, leaning your head forward against the rough of the trunk, and all of a sudden you are right back to where it all began. Passing notes to each other in homeroom. The thrill of getting changed under her gaze for gym class in the locker room. The day when the years of tension finally burst through the surface they were pressing against, where she pushed you down in the backseat of her car, and you spent hours exploring each other with your hands, eyes, lips, and tongues.

Back to when you were wondering if it was all normal, and the burning shame for convincing yourself it wasn’t. It was a different time back then, you tell yourself now.

The shame that came from your love for Lacey Long had faded, but as your finger traces through the perimeter of the heart, a thought much more painful demands attention. A familiar thought, one that you stopped acknowledging long ago. How different would your life had been if you ran away with Lacey Long, as you always promised each other you would? Your fingers subconsciously are drawn back to your jaw.

“Mama!” You tear your head and the thoughts swirling through it away from the tree trunk to find one of your sons, his chubby hand waving at you from where he has plopped himself down directly in the center of the brook. He smiles brightly, quite pleased with himself for what he has accomplished.

You walk away from the tree with A.M. + L.L. carved in it, to the brook with no beginning and end, towards your son, putting more physical distance between yourself and your house in the woods than your mother allowed you to do as a child. You take one last look at the tree, the carving indistinguishable from the native pattern of the bark down here by the brook, before pulling your son out of the rushing water.