 
Someday Now Forever

Daniel Foutz

Disclaimer

I have tried to recreate events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain anonymity, I have, in some instances, changed the names of individuals and places. I may have also changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations, and places of residence. The intention of this work is not to bring embarrassment or shame on anyone. This book is honest, and likewise, if we're honest with ourselves, I think we've all done things to be equally ashamed of as anyone I've written about. Please be gracious. Please don't try to sue me.

Thanks

To Jon, Callum, and the rest of the Firemen; my friends and brothers.

To Rosanna, Dorothy, Jamie, Bethany, and everyone else who helped me edit this mess.

And obviously to Jackson. I wasn't a writer until you made me believe I was.

Copyright © 2016 Daniel Foutz

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or if the text is reproduced in literal icing on a literal cake.
Prologue

There once was a blank page.

It isn't blank anymore because I wrote these words all over it.

So it's my fault, really.

This page was perfect before I came along. It was infinite possibility. It could have been the world's next great orchestral masterpiece or a college diploma or a cute doodle of a penguin. Someone could've folded it into a paper airplane and written, "I love you" on it and they might have meant it or not and maybe, might have, and a whole big bundle of perhapses. This page could have been anything, but it's not because you're still here ruining this beautiful thing with me. These once blank pages might have been anything but they're not because they are this. So, in a way, this is already the story of all of our lives.

Clocks

This is a second.

You spent it reading that sentence. Here's a few things you missed in the interim:

A hundred lightning bolts struck the earth as it hurtled eighteen and a half miles through space. Four people were born, one died, 41,000 updated their Facebook statuses, and a guy named Bill Gates made two hundred and fifty dollars. Couples had first kisses and last ones and humans around the world laughed and cried and swore and lied and screamed and punched walls and punched people and at least one somebody somewhere in our corner of the universe had their heart completely broken.

That was a second.

In that one second, the world around you became a different place. More stuff happened in that one second than will happen in this entire book. More stuff happened in that one second than will happen in any of our individual lifetimes. A second is a big deal.

This story ends in the freezing cold under the dancing sky as I hold in one final breath and think about the girl I'd crossed the world for.

580,000,000 seconds earlier...

I must confess, I was born at a very early age. Groucho Marx said that. I didn't hear it from him though on account of him being super dead by the time I popped out. The guy I did hear it from happens to be the world's greatest evangelistic top spinner, who, on a quest to snag the record for largest functional spinning toy, was hit in the back of the skull by a chunk of metal that broke off of the top's pulley system during the initial demonstration. Nearly killed him. But it didn't. After getting out of the hospital, he went back with a hole in his head, finished the top, and got it spinning. Some people might say he loves tops too much. He would probably say he loves Jesus, but never, ever enough. Maybe you can't have really loved something if it doesn't end up hurting you.

All that to say: I was born.

The thing that's kind of unfortunate about that whole deal is that the parents responsible for my birth were excellent. This is something most people don't think to complain about. Take a hundred strokes of lightning, though, to consider how many prolific authors had awesome parents. Done? I got Dr. Seuss but then stopped to wonder if a guy who makes up a last name for himself and then writes about latchkey children shepherded through life by an anthropomorphic fun-time party uncle cat could really be all that satisfied with his family life (and being forced to eat green eggs and ham? Tell me that's not a cause to call child services).

I digress.

The thing is, there's an alternate timeline where my mum and dad raised me in a cage, broke my kneecaps, and shoved bamboo shoots up my fingernails every night, and in which you are reading a much better book right now (like, one without a convoluted multiverse tangent or child abuse). Shouldn't blame them though. I mean, I'm sure they had the best of intentions when they decided not to break my legs with a tire iron.

Parenting is tricky like that.

The trouble is that most stories don't really happen until someone starts suffering and I didn't really start suffering until I was old enough to start talking to pretty girls. Luckily for me, however, my mother was able to fill me in on the details of at least one tragedy that I experienced before then. It was a tragedy of love, which is appropriate because that's pretty much what this whole mess is:

A love story.

Before I Lose

There once was a baby with red hair and my name and my parents and a pacifier named Binky.

Binky had a football as the bit that you stick in your mouth. So it would be appropriate to say that I sucked at sports from the beginning. Binky wasn't about sports though, Binky was about security. When I would cry (as I did often, despite not being in a cage with broken legs and bamboo fingers) my mum claims that I would be calmed only if I was brought Binky. I would not stop crying until I had Binky. I would not sleep without Binky.

I.

Loved.

Binky.

I was nineteen months old and my family was on a home assignment, which is a tradition where missionaries return to their home countries to beg people for money. We drove from Toronto to Seattle, all the while with me in the back seat sucking on Binky. Upon arrival at our destination, my parents wrenched the mangled, chewed up nub out of my mouth. It looked like a burn victim's severed toe, discovered in the yard of some serial killer's home after the dog got tired of gnawing on it.

Probably.

I mean, I'm editorializing a bit here. I don't actually remember any of this because (forgive me) I was a stupid baby. So was Shakespeare once. Gandhi too. Mother Teresa used to poop herself.

What I did not know back then—in addition to literally everything because I was one—is that my parents regularly replaced Binky with new, identical football-ended pacifiers. It was thusly natural for them, upon seeing the horror sticking out of my mouth, to pry away the old pacifier—the only thing I had ever loved—and to replace it with a new one that looked less like a prop from CSI.

But I knew.

I knew it was not my Binky. I wanted my Binky. I did not care that it was broken, the burn victim toe Binky was the only Binky for me. It was the One True Binky. It would not do, I thought, to have an ever-stretching parade of temporary Binkys. I wanted something to hold on to and depend on. So I did what all reasonable infants do.

I cried in long suspended wails like a cruising fire engine. I cried with great sobs and gasps like a helium voiced man drowning in the ocean. I cried and cried and cried. My parents, unable to console me, put me in a room alone to let me scream myself to sleep. From downstairs they listened to my caterwauling for hours, refusing to give me the satisfaction of acknowledgement. I was persistent, though. Sometime after my initial moans failed to get results they started to hear,

shunk... waah! shunk... waah!

Which was the sound of me slamming my head into the wooden door upstairs over and over again. Pacifiers and love share a common inevitability that I came to understand that day:

They suck.

This is a love story. It's also a rare instance where history has been recorded by the loser.

Us Against the World

I had a friend once.

His name was Peter. We became friends because we both liked turtles, he laughed at my jokes, and when we ate sandwiches we both threw away the corner bit of bread where we pinched the things between our thumbs and index fingers. Neither of us knew why, we just did.

Peter-and-I (which is what we were, a collective unit of he and I) went to a school called Trust Academy, which is an international institution for missionary kids built up on a hill at the edge of the city of Manila in the Philippines. My parents teach at Trust Academy and soon my sister, who went to college and is living the life of a responsible adult, will teach there as well. My sister was once a stupid baby who put a staple through my right index finger. She wanted to be an octopus when she was little. Really, she would have made for a horrible octopus, but it is kind of sad to see how quickly she abandoned her dreams.

Trust Academy has an amazing playground where Peter-and-I battled in feverish kickball matches and where my friend Dustin used to pogo stick for the entirety of lunch trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. It was where Abby Molaney kissed my cheek while we were swinging and I'd pretended like it was horrible even though I'd quite liked it. There was a merry go round that my sister split her head open flying off of and a big metal carriage with a big metal horse and these wooden animal swings where a boy in my class named Joe once whispered in confidence to us that his brother had gotten in big trouble for saying the F word and I had pretended to understand what that meant even though I didn't because I was a stupid baby and was just learning to count and spell and I only knew about eight F words and two of them were frog.

There was this building with a firefighter pole and a rope going down to the playground's lower levels. I once was hanging on that rope while this older kid was swinging it and he shook it so hard that I fell and cleaved open my face and had to be sewn back together. 186,000,000 seconds later that kid was in high school only a week away from graduating and he goes into my dad's office (because my dad was the high school principal at the time) and he says, "Mr. Foutz?" with his head hung low and then he explains how way back when he'd swung the rope and that's why his son had a scar on his face and he'd felt guilty about it ever since even though my dad and I and everyone else more or less forgot that it even happened.

That playground was its own turning world; a prototype for future big persons to learn how to interact with each other. It had its own rules and social system and games. One of those games was called Girls Chase Boys and Try to Catch Them and Kiss Them, which was a love it or hate it deal amongst the boys depending on how firm our faith was in cooties. We all ran of course, but we didn't all run quite as fast as we could have or hide in places that were particularly hidden. Not Peter-and-I though. We loved the game too much to succumb to the charms of its players. He-and-I found ourselves sitting about fifteen feet up on the scaffolding that held up this massive slide one day as we hid out from the puckered lips of the cootie infected. It was there where we had this talk that stands out in bold color in my faded scrapbook of the way back whens.

"You know how most people end up having girlfriends and getting married?" I asked Peter. Our legs dangled from the scaffolding beneath the slide that dominated our tri-level playground dominion. All around we heard the faint screams of our male compatriots and the giggles of the girls who viciously hunted them. Peter-and-I never got caught. We were fast, cunning, and... well to be honest it could've been that we weren't the objects of the young ladies' fancies. I don't know what draws the romantic interests of seven year old girls. Not gingers or kids from Austria apparently.

"Yeah?"

"So, do you think that means that you and I will get girlfriends someday? You know, in a long time when we're super old, like fifteen or something?"

Peter shrugged. "I guess so. Most people do so I guess we will too."

I paused. "But we'll still be friends."

"Yeah," he said. "Of course."

My whole life I'd lived in the same house and gone to the same school and had the same sandwich wasting friend. I suppose I just assumed that it would always be that way; Peter-and-I against the world. That moment under the slide was the first time that I realized that things might not always be so. If we could change so much that we would want girlfriends, how could we stop ourselves from changing into people who didn't like each other?

Soon the girls were gone and we were bored of not being chased so I just said, "Getting grown up is weird," and we hopped back down to earth as it continued turning, bringing us in loop back to that same place, though not as the people we once were.

—

There's only so far you can get with turtles and bad jokes before you need someone else in there to break a few awkward silences. Over the years Peter-and-I went through a lot of "Third Guys." We would have stuck with one but they always wound up leaving. That happens a lot when you're a missionary kid. People leaving. I guess that happens a lot to everybody but I think it happened faster to us. Our first Third Guy was a dude named Taylor. He packed up and left for Singapore in grade four.

Which sucked.

Next it was Josh, who was in our lives for just one year before returning to the distant and mysterious land known as, "The States."

That sucked too.

After Josh came Sean, who was the best Third Guy a couple of middle school dudes could ask for. He was the best friend Peter-and-I had ever had. He was the kind of guy who made you feel special to know; the kind of guy who, also, made you feel like the kind of guy that a person would feel special to know when he laughed at your joke or offered you a sip of his Coke. We loved him.

So he left.

(Obviously.)

Soon after Sean told us he was leaving, Peter announced that he would be gone for a year as well. They said those things and I said, "Okay," and then I went for a walk in the rain.

For years I'd had these ratty shoes that were always falling apart. Every time they did I would get more tape and patch them back together. That day, however, walking in the rain, I felt my sock sink into the thin layer of water flowing over the broken street. I looked down and saw the torn away sole of my right sneaker lying in a puddle a few feet back. When I went to pick it up, the ring of tape slid off my other shoe and it went to pieces as well. So I took off the shoes, and my socks, and I threw them all in a rusted barrel on the side of the road and returned barefoot to apartment 503 in the Valley Condominium.

After that I just wore sandals.

—

Sean and Peter were great friends to me, but we were all three pretty lousy to a lot of the people around us so I didn't get much sympathy when they left. My classmates weren't jerks about it and I didn't get bullied and nobody hated me or anything as far as I know, but there was no Third Guy. There was no Second Guy. There was just a guy.

So I wrote a book.

Because that's what lonely people do I guess.

I wrote a book and I made a vow that no temporary people were going to walk away with pieces of me again. My book was called, The Rift and even in the reality where I get raised in a cage and have bamboo shoots jammed up my fingernails that book is awful, but I discovered through it that writing was like having friends inside my head who didn't go away unless I composed noble and bloody deaths for them. Writing might not have been better than real friends but it was certainly less of a gamble.

—

Peter came back the year we both started high school. I met him on campus a few days before classes began and he got out of the car, about four inches taller than I remembered, and walked over to me with a big grin on his face. He opened his arms for a hug and I put my hand out to pull him in for a chest bump and we kind of just squeezed into each other with my arm sandwiched between us.

"How was Austria?" I asked up to him.

"Good. How was here?" His voice was way deeper than it had been before.

"Your voice is way deeper than it was before."

"Yours too," he said.

"Yeah." I tried to put my hands in my pockets but missed and so ended up just patting my thighs and blowing air out of my mouth. "Good," I said. "Here was good." I adjusted my glasses.

"Oh yeah. Good. Good."

"Do you hear from Sean?"

He shrugged. "I did a couple of times. You?"

"Couple times," I said, thinking as I said it that it must be true even though I couldn't recall having made an attempt to contact him. I crossed my arms in front of me. I moved one hand to my hip. I adjusted my glasses. "Wanna go praise Jesus?" I laughed weakly.

"Yeah, let's go."

Our school had chapel sessions because, y'know, missionaries. There were students at Trust Academy who weren't Christians but that was something you tended to keep quiet. Personally, I liked Jesus. Jesus never had to move back to the States. Well I mean, Mormon Jesus did, but Mormon Jesus wasn't the Jesus I was into. Peter and I stood next to each other and clapped and sang too quietly for each other to hear. When the music was done we sat as we knew to do and a smiling face we recognized walked up and started speaking. He talked about a boy and a girl in love in an apple orchard who ate the wrong fruit and wound up crying for answers in the desert.

"A lot of people miss," said the speaker, "the fact that the Bible mentions another special tree in the garden of Eden. In addition to the tree of knowledge of good and evil, there was the tree of life, which..." I tuned out, losing myself in a story in my head with lazer swords and dangerous journeys and a protagonist who always got what he wanted in the end.

When chapel finished, Peter and I walked outside and I said, "Hey it's great to have you back, man."

"Yeah, it's really good to see you, man," said Peter. We hugged, my face sort of up against a pectoral muscle that certainly wasn't there before. "I'll see you at school, man."

"You too, man." We were very manly.

I walked home in my sandals.

Talk

We were in Jesus class.

The room was on three tiers because it had been a choir room at some point. It had become the whatever room, which is why many of our freshman classes took place there, freshman typically being viewed as the, "whatever" age group. The smell from the blue carpet was mold, probably older than me, as was the map on the wall which still contained the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Walking into that place made your body and eyelids feel heavy, the air inside a cloud of damp wood shavings thick like some 60s cheap motel room. I sat, rocking myself steadily with sandal jammed into that little cubby built into desks to allow students to text discreetly during class. I stared off into space and walked around in some poorly adjectivised writing world my brain. Rooms of voices like that class at that moment are just talk noise; so many words and inflections jumbling up like Play-Doh until the only discernible audio from it all are those Peanuts cartoon parent brown garble tones.

"Wuh wa waa, wuh wa wuh wawa waa. Wuhwa novel I'm writing..."

Her voice came through the wood chips, past the mold, clearer than the bold typeface of more than one antiquated communist nation. It was the unfamiliar voice of a girl somewhere off to the left of me. I couldn't see her and I didn't try to because I was way too cool for that. I just continued to rock back and forwards in my chair listening to that impossibly discernible voice talking about the book she was going to write for National Novel Writing Month.

"It's about this girl who's a musician and can make people fall in love with her by playing this one song. But she falls in love with this guy who lives in space and can only visit her once a year so she records these love songs for him to listen to while they're separated. But then there's this other guy—"

"Hello," I said, standing a tier below her desk so that my head arrived just behind her purple pencil case. She swiveled her attention from the girl sitting next to her to angle down in my direction. Her name was Adilyn Chan. I knew this because we had the kind of school where you knew the names of everyone even if you didn't talk to any of them (which I pretty much didn't). That was the first of four things I knew about Adilyn Chan. The rest were these:

2. She was a Filipino girl with a Chinese last name, which meant she was probably rich.

3. She liked to write books, and (I could assume), read them.

4. She was beautiful.

Adilyn Chan had big hair like a black Shakira and eyes that were brown enormous behind glasses on a face too small for her features. I was caught in those eyes at that moment like headlamps on a deer. Or whatever.

"Did I hear you mention NaNoWriMo?" That's what the cool kids called National Novel Writing Month. I mean, they would if there were any cool kids who knew about National Novel Writing Month.

She pulled a stray hair back behind her ear as she nodded and made a positive mouth closed sound that meant, "Yup!"

"I don't know if I'll finish it, but I thought it would be fun," she said. "I have this story in my head but it's hard to write it out without it turning into gross word mush."

"It can be tough," I said as I climbed up and over the desk next to hers to get closer to her. This was about as unnatural as it sounds. "You just have to sit down and make yourself do it. I," looked at the wall and smiled, trying to make the douchiest thing in existence sound casual, "actually wrote my first ever book last year during NaNoWriMo."

"You finished? Shut up!" She bounced up and down with an unanticipated energy. "That's amazing! What was your story about?"

I considered how a science fiction novel about a dimension of matter sucked up by black holes (which I still hadn't written the last chapter of) would sell to a fifteen year old girl.

"It's about life," I said. "I mean isn't that what all books are about, really?"

"Dude," she smiled. "That's fantastic. Your name is Daniel, right?"

"Daniel Foutz," I said. I think just because I liked the sound of my name. She paused for half a second, staring up somewhere into her cloud of hair.

"Like the principal?" I tried not to wince.

"Yes. Yeah. My dad, he's the principal."

She laughed and said, "Okay, Daniel, I guess I'll have to be nice to you then."

"Nah you can goff," I said. Kind of.

"What?"

I cleared my throat, determined not to die a virgin. "You're Adilyn?" She made the happy yup sound again. The bell rang and bodies streamed for fresh air. I stretched out a hand. "Good luck on your novel, Adilyn."

"I don't know if I'll finish it," she said. "I think I'm more just in it for the adventure."

"Trust me, if I can do it, anybody can."

I watched her gather up the items on her table. In addition to her purple pencil case, she had a case for her notebook, her glasses, and a water bottle. Her backpack was just a container to hold smaller containers; a judiciously compartmentalized life.

"I don't know about that," she said to me as she pushed in her chair and left. Trailing behind her was the sweetly distinct detergent smell of her clothes and also myself, strung along like an inveigled fish with a mop of red hair and no idea what a fillet is.

Sparks

"Hey, Peter, have you met Adilyn?"

We sat atop a freshman hallway locker wall. Behind us the ratcheting sprinkler drizzled colorful jungle plants and below our feet students and teachers moved like currents. Everything smelled like fresh wet grass trimmings and Axe body spray.

"Yeah. We hung out after school the other day." He scooped a bite of cafeteria rice from a styrofoam plate and shoved it in his mouth. "She's pretty cool."

"Really cool." For the first time I regretted going home to write instead of hanging around to socialize after the last bell rang.

Peter raised an eyebrow as he swallowed his bite. "Do you like her?"

My mouth opened and then closed as Adilyn sauntered into vision below. When she moved it was like she went out in every direction at once, her arms swinging about sideways and her hair lilting along with her. She leapt lightly with these little ebullient gambols when passing a friend and seeing us she made a little rainbow wafture with her hands as she drifted on like a summer otter in the Susquehanna.

It was all disturbingly cute.

Peter waved back and I shot up two fingers and smiled a closed mouth smile, embarrassed of my crooked teeth.

"Dunno," I said, withdrawing my hand and instantly regretting everything following my birth. "I've only talked with her a little bit." She disappeared around the corner. "Mostly on Facebook. Do you like her?"

Peter shrugged. "Maybe. She's going to the banquet with Josh though."

"I know." I made a fart noise with my mouth.

Josh Nelson was a quiet and mysterious musician slash skater punk with these precious gem blue eyes that he kept hidden away behind brown bangs straight out of a Pantene commercial. But like, a badass Pantene commercial. This was the guy who had asked Adilyn out on her first date, thus ruining any chance that us lower life forms might have had.

"He's cool," said Peter.

"Yeah." It was an unfortunate but undeniable fact. The only course of action that I had been able to come up with to circumvent inevitable romance was to recommend (via Facebook correspondence) that Adilyn get him a pack of cigarettes when she asked me what I thought he would like as a banquet gift. Underhanded? I mean, sure but what was I supposed to do? What if they got married and he never quit smoking and their babies all died of lung cancer? Really I was just looking out for the children.

"Whatever, I don't want to spend money for that thing anyway," said Peter.

I snorted, "Yeah, no way. We'll have way more fun hanging out at your house."

—

We didn't. Our friends got gussied up for fancy catered food and live music and decorative memory-making ambience. Peter and I watched Legally Blondes. Not Legally Blonde, but Legally Blondes. To sum up the plot for you, it's kind of like what would happen if a studio executive filmed his daughter playing with her Barbies and then commissioned a movie based on that tape. We saved twenty dollars on banquet junk, which is incidentally an amount that I would happily pay to have not watched Legally Blondes.

I don't know, though. There was still something to be said for the solidarity of two friends not having dates together.

—

I managed to move my e-communications with Adilyn from Facebook to Skype by telling her that my Facebook instant messenger wasn't working properly. That was basically like saying that my Google wasn't Googling but hey, it worked. Lies work way more often than the truth.

danster237: How was the banquet?

xTheScientistx: It was cool. I had a good time.

danster237: Awesome. So Josh... nice guy, huh?

xTheScientistx: Yeah he was really sweet.

danster237: good looking too

xTheScientistx: lol I guess so?

danster237: yeah

xTheScientistx: I hate that I just wrote lol. lol is so stupid.

danster237: lol yeah I know.

xTheScientistx: :D

danster237: So... do you like him?

xTheScientistx: Josh? Yeah I like him.

danster237: Cool

xTheScientistx: I mean, I wouldn't want to date him or anything

danster237: Oh? Why not?

xTheScientistx: He's not really my type.

danster237: You have a type?

xTheScientistx: I guess you have to date someone to have a type :D But whatever my type is I don't think it's Josh.

danster237: I see. You've never dated anyone?

xTheScientistx: No. At my old school there was this terrible girl named Dana who told everyone I looked like a pug so no one was supposed to hang out with me because I was the pug girl

danster237: that's awful. I don't think you look like a pug

xTheScientistx: I DON'T LOOK LIKE A PUG

danster237: not even a little

xTheScientistx: cool, we can be friends. have you dated anyone?

danster237: I've sent some emails to Emma Watson if that counts

xTheScientistx: it very much does not

danster237: Then nope. Weird sexual chemistry with a girl named Cleo back in grade six but all of our interactions were centered around Taco Bell.

xTheScientistx: Like, you met at Taco Bell?

danster237: no just the only thing we talked about was Taco Bell. It was like an inside joke that became a horrible outside reality.

xTheScientistx: Do you like anyone now?

danster237: No, I hate all people. Basically Hitler.

xTheScientistx: Oh my gosh loser you know what I mean.

danster237: Yeah.

xTheScientistx: Yeah? You like someone?

danster237: Yeah. I do.

xTheScientistx: Who is it?

danster237: secret.

xTheScientistx: tellmetellmetellmetellmetellme

danster237: secretcrab

xTheScientistx: secret crab? Is that a thing?

danster237: It is now

xTheScientistx: awww, like Taco Bell

danster237: this is a road you don't want to walk down

xTheScientistx: You're really not going to tell me?

danster237: Nope

xTheScientistx: Hmm... mystery girl.

danster237: Yup

xTheScientistx: Okay Foutz, have it your way.

danster237: Coming to Peter's house tomorrow?

xTheScientistx: Yup

danster237: K. See you there Ladle.

xTheScientistx: Ladle?

danster237: Uh yeah, it's your nickname.

xTheScientistx: Ladle.

danster237: indeed.

xTheScientistx: You're gonna have to be a more original than that.

danster237: it's that or puggles

xTheScientistx: I will end you.

danster237: Whatever Chan. See you at Peter's.

—

Peter's house was so close to Trust Academy that if you leaned out of the middle school science rooms and whistled loud enough you could get his staggeringly big black great dane, Hercules to run out onto his balcony.

Probably.

Peter's parents let pretty much anyone come and go as they pleased, so Peter, Sean, and I used to use it as a home base back before everyone went away. That day, shortly after school, I came up the stairs to find Peter, Adilyn, a Mexican girl named Ruth, a Swedish girl named Lenna, and three Korean guys named Moses, Dae Park, and Tim, all lying around a TV set like some sort of public school textbook stock photo.

Aidlyn was sprawled out on the couch in the back in a black Ninja Turtles t-shirt. I sat down next to her. We were watching 500 Days of Summer and Peter had picked a chair by himself so I figured it would be fine for me to try and make a move.

My move was sitting next to her.

This in itself was endlessly exciting to me but unfortunately by the time Joseph Gordon Levitt was on the screen saying, "You think back on all the times you've had with someone and you just replay it in your head over and over again and you look for those first signs of trouble," Adilyn had moved to the floor to lean on Ruth. Dae Park and Lenna were so tangled up at that point that you couldn't tell where one started and the other stopped.

I mean, if you were colorblind.

And, y'know, a kind of color blind where you can't tell white from brown?

So... just regular blind I guess.

I wasn't thusly afflicted so I can tell you that her knee stopped somewhere on top of his thigh and his hand stopped somewhere, like, behind her boob. Does that make sense? Like his hand was on her middle section but the laws of physics and the proportions of Lenna's Scandinavian heritage meant that things were definitely hanging on top of things.

I was alone.

Obviously.

That was fine though because Adilyn was with her girl friend and two of the three dudes not being fondled by a Swedish girl were in tears so I felt like of the multicultural sampling I was looking alright as a prospective romantic option.

The movie finished. Lenna and Dae Park went to go make out on the balcony (where they could be seen by anyone looking out of the middle school science room windows (Probably)). Ruth was patting a sobbing Moses on the back and the rest of us just kind of sat there. My shirt was pulled up to reveal the most blinding surface of where abs would have been on a more heroically modeled individual. The weather was hot because it was the Philippines but really the shirt was up because I wanted to do a little advertising of goods that I did not know I did not posses.

"What time is it?" asked Adilyn.

Not a lot of people my age wore a watch. I did, however, because every now and again it meant pretty girls asked me a question. "It is four twenty one," I said.

"Shit." She quickly covered her mouth with her hands. "Sorry. Slipped out. I have to go back to school. My driver's going to be pissed. My mom too. Ugh. Thanks for having me over, Peter." He stood up and she gave him a big squeeze. "Bye, Hercules!" The immense black mass of dog rolled over onto his belly and Adilyn bent over to give him a rub before turning to me to say, "Bye, Daniel!" She picked up her bag filled with smaller bags.

"Well hey, I'll walk with you."

"You don't have to do that," she said.

"No no, I go by there anyway on my way home."

"You walk home?" she asked.

"Every day." That was the truth.

"Don't you live in the other direction?"

"It's faster to go your way." That was not. She smiled.

I put on my new sneakers so I could walk back up the hill to campus with her. We talked about how much we liked the movie and about Lenna and Dae Park's budding romance and how our novels were going.

"Quit," she said.

"Already? Come on Ladle."

"I'm not Ladle!" she decried.

"Whatever you say." I put my hands up in surrender and then mumbled, "Ladle."

She stuck her tongue out. "Favorite band. Go!"

I did a search of my mental rolodex of musicians trying to come up with a band that would make me look like I knew about "real" music and didn't go for any, "top forties garbage."

"Mine's Coldplay," she volunteered after a few moments of silence.

I felt the sensation of weight leaving my shoulders. "They're great! What's your favorite song by them?"

She looked up into her hair for the answer. "Fix You," she decided.

"Oh yeah? Lights will gui-ey-ey-ey-ide you home..." I sang. "That one?"

She did her silent yup noise. I loved her silent yup noise. I also loved all of her other noises but that one was particularly great.

"And igni-ey-ey-ey-ite your bones. And I will try to fix you." She said more than sang it, obviously a little embarrassed despite the fact that her singing voice was pretty good.

"Duh nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh nee-nee na-na." I did some sick air guitars motions and tried to play off the cracking of my voice by saying in a deep baritone, "Great song."

"Great. Song." She beamed. There was a pantheon of opinion in her eyes as she threw out her hands and declared, "They're amazing. I love them."

"Me too." And while I hadn't felt that way until that conversation, I did, as of that moment, love Coldplay. I loved Coldplay in a very real way. It helps that Coldplay is kind of the vanilla ice cream of music, but when Adilyn Chan would later talk to me about her love for Coldplay, I believed as she spoke that she was the one person who truly, originally, loved Coldplay. Such was the power of her enthusiasm.

"Did you answer the English questions?"

"What, that sheet thing on The Odyssey? No I haven't looked at it."

"I got stuck on the question about why Odysseus would leave Ogygia," she said. "Or however you pronunce it."

"You mean pronounce it?"

"How many languages do you speak?"

"Okay, fair point."

"Calypso's island," she iterated. "Like, he could have lived forever on the beach with a beautiful woman eating delicious food with the gods."

I shrugged. "I dunno. That sounds like an alright forever to me. But I didn't read the thing so..."

"Slacker," she said. "Why, too busy writing your book?"

"Oh, I quit too."

She shoved me. "Why?"

I shrugged. "I just have other things going on right now."

"Oh yeah? Like your mystery girlfriend?"

"She's not my girlfriend. But yeah. Like her."

Adilyn looked down at her pink shoes. "Have you even talked to her?"

"Not really. Just like, hello and stuff." I had been getting worried that my little game would become too obvious so I added, "She's pretty busy with sports and stuff." Adilyn Chan was a million and six things but she wasn't an athlete.

"Well talk to her, dummy!" She scrunched up her face and squinted her eyes to try and look serious.

"I will."

"Good," she said as we approached the rolling gate that let cars into the school. "You'd better."

"You got it, ma'am."

"Ma'am?"

"What, you don't like it?"

She humphed. "Better than Ladle. Seeya, Foutz. Thanks for keeping me safe from the kidnappers."

I grinned wide. "Any time."

She waved and hurried up and through the gate to meet her driver. When I was sure she couldn't see me anymore I turned around and walked back the way we had come to get to my house. The sneakers were breaking in pretty well.

Yes

"A nipple is a nipple no matter how small."

I whispered it to her as the blue Avatar people did their thing on the movie screen. Peter laughed from over her other shoulder.

"It can't be a nipple," said Adilyn. "Can they show women's nipples in a PG-13 movie?" We were at Robinsons, the mall just across the busy highway from Adilyn's fancy house in her gated subdivision, Paradiso.

"You know they're not real, right?" Then suddenly I became very serious. "Adilyn. Adilyn, hello?"

"What?"

"Can you hear me, Adilyn?" I pulled off her 3D glasses.

She slapped my hand and grabbed the glasses back, "What are you doing?"

"Adilyn," I said slowly. "I know this new three dimensional technology is convincing, but that's not the real world in there." I took her hand. "I don't know how to tell you this but those Avatar people are just an illusion."

Peter continued laughing as she rolled her eyes red and blue enormous behind 3D glasses. Someone went,

shh!

"Sorry," I said back. "My friend is having an existential breakdown."

"You are such a dork," she said with the smile of a girl with a secret thing for dorks.

When the movie was over we decided to explore the hotel that was attached to the mall. We made a show out of acting casual in the lobby but it could have been only the concierge's patience or unwillingness to make a scene with some white kids that prevented us from being removed from the establishment as we engaged in a Scooby-Doo montage of going in and out and up and down the elevators. After some time we began to catch on to the subtle staff scowls and promptly rerouted ourselves to the outdoor courtyard by the pools.

High shrubs kept the busy streets below out of view so all we could see were the tops of buildings stretching up into the stars, dim but flickering bravely through the city fog. The group was high on life, energy, and in retrospect I think at least a couple of them had taken some drugs.

I sat in a pool chair and watched them hit each other with palm fronds that they ripped off of well manicured Shangri-La plants. During times like that I felt like a cameraman; nothing to add to the scene but content and comfortable with watching from the sidelines, filming it all in my gelatin emulsion brain. Adilyn took a seat in the chair next to mine.

"Hey bud," she said. "You okay?"

I grinned, staring not at her but the sky. "Always."

She rolled her eyes. I knew that she rolled her eyes because she stuck her face in my line of vision to do so, puffing up her cheeks with a goofy expression. When she removed her head from view the universe reappeared behind her.

"That's not true," her voice said next to me.

"No," I admitted. "But it is now. Like, you almost never see the stars out."

Manila's beautiful sunsets and high rates of lung cancer deaths can both be attributed to the clouds of smog that hang over the peaks of the downtown skyscrapers.

"I know." I heard the creaking plastic sound of her leaning back in her chair. "When they're out like this I like to sneak onto the roof of my house so I can watch them."

"Oh yeah?"

She laughed. "Don't tell my parents. I like to watch and listen to music."

"Yeah," I said. "I've got a spot like that too. You just stare up and it's like the music fills up the sky."

"Exactly."

A pink earbud appeared in front of my face.

I turned to evaluate the space between our chairs. "I don't think that cord's long enough," I said.

"Well, this isn't the right way to watch stars anyway."

We moved down to the tiles in the courtyard by the pool of the fancy hotel attached to the mall across from Adilyn's house. Our feet pointed off in opposite directions and our ears almost touched as Coldplay lyrics drifted up to the stars in the grand void. I felt her black Shakira hair against the side of my face. Around us our friends were wrestling Moses up off the ground to baptize him fully clothed in the pool. We weren't with them. We were all alone beneath that foggy lens, staring into the center of the universe, tied together by a pair of pink earbuds.

—

She was late. Peter and the gang with their dates had gone inside while I stood by the road waiting for her car to show up. The sun was slipping away behind the mango tree when she finally stepped out in her flared periwinkle dress. I stretched out a nervous hand of flowers and tried not to stare too much or too little. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. This was probably not true but, to me, in that moment, she was inarguably more spectacular than any other girl could possibly have been. Ladies of all ranges of physical beauty transform regularly into goddesses in the minds of smitten boys.

"I'm sorry!" she said anxiously, running over to me as best she could in heels (which brought her eyes almost to the height of my chin). "Thank you," she added, taking the flowers and throwing her arms around my neck, drawing me down into her sweet scented cloud of hair.

"No problem." I put my arm out for her to take.

"I feel so bad!" she said threading her tiny hand past my elbow. "I feel like I'm always keeping you waiting."

"Oh you are," I said, grinning as she made a big sympathetic frown. "But you're worth it." I caught her beaming smile out of the corner of my eye as we went down the stairs to join our friends inside for the Sadie Hawkins Rhythmic Movement Event. (Missionary parents tend to be a little Footloose townish about dancing so Student Council had to choose their adjectives carefully.)

The rhythmic movement portion of the night began with square dancing, as it is the most platonic of rhythmical movements and thus one of the few approved for our function. Adilyn-and-Peter-and-I and the gang lined up and clapped and spun to honky-tonk music in the Christmas lit gymnasium. This went on until the sweaty young court was panting on the basketball bleachers. I had just brought Adilyn a glass of punch when the slow Sarasate strings began to play with lowered lights.

"No no no," she said as I stretched out for her hand. "I don't know how to dance."

I loosened my tie. "Don't worry about it," I said. "I do." Ever since Adilyn had asked me out I'd been going home to learn how to waltz from Youtube. I don't want to brag or anything but my swivel chair and I could dance a pretty hot box step.

We entered the spotlight with the mirror ball stars swirling around us. I took her hand so small in my own and pressed fingers against her lower back. We went one box step, box two three, spin two three, prom en ade... and it wasn't perfect, but it totally was.

After dancing, we left the stuffy sports hall and walked outside along the flickering trail of melting candles that Student Council had set up along the path where the hill dropped off and you could see the Manila skyline glowing with all its little lights. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. She gave me a lighter shaped like a cow. It was beautiful.

"They wouldn't sell me cigarettes," she said.

shick, shick

I clicked the little flame out of the cow's nostrils and the light showed my beaming face. "You don't get your gift yet," I said.

"No fair!"

"Later," I said. "It's a surprise."

She linked her arm back around mine as we turned to go and rejoin Peter and the others and she said, "Okay, Mr. Mystery."

—

The gang had been invited to the home of one of Adilyn's wealthy Filipino friends to swim after the dance. I normally detested swimming but I could make an exception. A night in which I got to see Adilyn in both a dress and a bathing suit was hard to find fault in. We swam in the dark and splashed and ate piles of junk food and after a while I retreated to my cinematographic perch on the sidelines in one of the plastic pool chairs. Adilyn and Ruth chicken fought on Peter and Tim's shoulders and I smiled and turned the wrapping papered square that was Adilyn's present around in my hands and felt the

thump thump

of my nervous heart. Wrapped in a towel, she found her way next to me and shook water from her hair, getting me wet again.

"Hey, bud," she said.

I slid the gift under the chair surreptitiously and smiled. "Hi."

"You okay?"

"Always," I said, shivering ever so slightly. She rolled her eyes at the stock response, but it had never been more true than that night.

"Dude, you look cold." She opened her towel. There was something emasculating about being on the receiving end of the whole, "here take my jacket" shtick, but a beautiful, soaking wet girl was opening her towel to invite me inside. Me without my shirt on sat huddled next to her wet swimsuit was like, at least second base in missionary school (and I'm pretty sure Baptists think that's what sex is).

"You never gave me a gift," she said.

She was so close. Her lips were so close there in our towel space. Her lips were close and, like, sexy. I felt a little guilty seeing her like that but I didn't know if it was wrong. This wasn't sexy like self loathing internet porn sexy. I didn't want to strip her naked or feel her breasts or anything like that. It was a new kind of sexy to me. Like, a right kind. I didn't know if Jesus approved. Mormon Jesus probably did, what with all the golden underwear stuff, but, regardless, I wanted to be wrapped up softly with her in some gentle pocket where we could just stay for a while.

She raised her eyebrows at my too long silence and gave me a look that made me laugh, snapping me out just in time to halt the rise of an erection that would have been devastatingly difficult to conceal in swim trunks.

Thank you non-Mormon Jesus.

I reached under the chair. "Here."

I handed over the gift. Her eyes widened, which seemed like it should have been impossible. She made a firework version of her silent yup noise and her tiny hands tore away the paper to reveal the compact disc case. The album art was a silhouetted boy staring out over an amber sky of stars and the title read, For Adilyn.

"Oooh," she said. "Mixtape."

"You have to listen to them in order, okay?" She made her wonderful yup noise. "Promise?" She said she promised. I stood up. "Alright." Locking eyes with Peter with his shirt back on I could see he was ready to leave. "Thanks for asking me out, Ads."

"You know they used to call me Aids back at my old school?"

I stifled a laugh poorly.

"I like Ads better." She rolled her eyes and added, "Definitely better than Ladle."

"Ladle's a winner," I said, putting my own shirt on as we walking towards Ruth's car.

"Whatever, Fartz."

Peter and Ruth climbed into the backseat. "Night," I said, giving Adilyn a goodbye hug. I followed my friends into the van.

"Hey!" she called out. "What's this last song?" The final item on the CD's track list was just a bunch of question marks.

I yelled out the window, "It's a mystery!" and she stuck her tongue out at me as I left the driveway.

—

My goal had been to construct a musical time machine that would speed her in memory over the last five months. Each song on that CD was a painstakingly edited mashup of music she loved and movie quotes and inside jokes with the final track being a song I personally wrote and recorded about her called, "Mystery Girl." That was how I told Adilyn that I liked her very much.

Such was freshman romance.

She didn't say anything about it at school. She didn't say anything to me at all, she simply walked up, pressed a USB drive into my hand and walked away. The USB contained a video, which contained Adilyn cross-legged on her bed explaining the way she had felt since we started hanging out, half the time through a pillow that she kept burying her face in. Every second of it was physically painful to watch, but starting it over from the beginning for the third time, my smile was undeteriorated. I walked away from my computer with the dorkiest grin still frozen on my face. I, Daniel Foutz, liked a girl named Adilyn Chan, and a girl named Adilyn Chan liked me.

Very much.

—

Meanwhile, the two members of the Daniel Foutz Internal Council of Romance discuss the turn of events...

The Stallion: Wallace, he's done it!

Wallace: It would appear so.

The Stallion: After fifteen years, Wallace. This is everything! All of our research. A girl likes him! A pretty girl.

Wallace: Yeah...

The Stallion: Come on, Wallace, why can't you perk up for once? You've done your job! He's on his way. All those long nights sifting through her instant messages, the planning, the dancing? How long did it take us to teach him to dance?

Wallace: But we never expected it to come so soon! Damnit Jason—

The Stallion: The Stallion.

Wallace: NO ONE is going to call you that!

The Stallion: Stubborn neigh sayer.

Wallace: Just—never mind. Look, he's young. She's young. Sure, he's got a relationship now but right at the beginning of high school? The probability of sustaining a romantic engagement through a period like this... Well, it's simply astronomical.

The Stallion: Then strap on your spacesuit, Buzz.

Wallace: This is serious!

The Stallion: Do I look like I'm joking?

Wallace: We're mental projections of the subconscious. You don't look like anything.

The Stallion: Heh... That's typical of you, Wallace. Never had a dream in the head. Just a spreadsheet and your stupid percentages.

Wallace: I'm just being realistic here. This is serious. A few wrong moves and we'll have a black—

The Stallion: Don't say it.

Wallace: Fine. But you have to understand.

The Stallion: I do, Wallace. Honest I do. But I know I can keep his heart from breaking.

Wallace: You can't promise that.

The Stallion: No. I can't. But together I believe we can do it. Will you believe with me, Wallace? For once in your life would you step out from behind the numbers and be a proper emotion?

Wallace: . . . Okay.

The Stallion: Okay?

Wallace: Let's cook up some young romance.

Lost?

I was Jew number six in Fiddler on the Roof.

None of the rest of the gang made the audition. That was the one degree that my course diverged from Peter and the Wolfpack (Peter and the international movie gang had started calling themselves the Wolfpack). It's not something we sat down and talked about. Like, I didn't get voted off the island or anything, I just did my final bows with someone else's face on and when the house lights came up all I had to see was the empty row. The crime for which I lost my friends was that I did precisely nothing and let time make us all strangers.

I still saw them around and we were nice and everything but when the last bell rang, they piled into a minivan and I walked back to apartment 503 and lost myself in a long list of movies you're supposed to see if you want to know about movies. Adilyn was still my best friend. I was, however, seeing her more through a Skype chat message box than in real life, her always out running with the Wolfpack. And we weren't dating. This was because her parents had apparently outlawed romance in all forms.

"We're in purgatory," she moaned.

It was near the end of grade ten and we were sitting in the concrete tunnel where she watched Fight Club with me on my laptop the year before. She didn't love Fight Club like I loved Fight Club, but that was okay because no one loved Fight Club like I loved Fight Club. Before Fight Club, Avatar was my favorite movie. After Fight Club, my computer's unfinished documents folder was filled with screenplays instead of novels. Everything was just better in movies.

"We can't stop feeling what we feel and we can't start dating," she said. It was the first time we were having the old conversation in person.

"So what are we?" I asked.

"You're my best friend." She put a hand on my forearm.

I nodded slowly. "Yeah, but what else are we?"

Her eyes unlocked from mine, swinging open to the graffiti scrawled concrete. "I don't know. What do you want to be?"

"To be continued?"

She cocked an eyebrow. "To be continued?"

"Yeah. Like, the love story can't progress forward at the moment because there's a commercial break, but to be continued. Sorry," I added after her pause. "I know that word freaks you out."

"It doesn't freak me out it just—" She waved her arms in little frustrated circles, trying to unjam her sentence. "It makes me feel bad."

"Why does that make you feel bad?" I tried not to sound hurt.

"Because I can't date you!" she said.

"Yet." I grinned.

The corners of her mouth wilted and she sighed. "Yeah, but you could be waiting for a long time."

"I know," I said. "But you're worth it."

I felt her rebloomed lips against my cheek and as they peeled away the soft sensation lingered there with the detergent smell that was just as much Adilyn Chan as the tidal wave of hair or those whirlpool eyes.

Yellow

The earth flew around the sun.

Lightning struck the earth two billion times. I heard there was a royal wedding and a guy named Osama was executed. I wasn't really paying attention. I spent the year watching two hundred and fifty seven movies on my lonely laptop screen in apartment 503. I guess somehow the world went on changing without me. That's what made it so special when I saw Adilyn standing there outside my door in her black Ninja Turtles t-shirt. I'd asked her to wear something good for sneaking because I was taking her to my spot. Except that my spot was very much not my spot, which was why getting to it required dark clothing and the cover of night.

"What are we doing?" she asked.

"Follow me."

I led her to the bottom of a hidden set of stairs tucked away at the far end of my condominium building. At the landing I froze and held up a hand to signal her to stop like some sort of SWAT team movie. Peering out carefully I watched and waited for the security guard to leave the pool area and make his rounds into the parking garage. I did that little flick of the wrist and pointed in the way movie Spec Ops people do.

"What?" she whispered.

"Go!

From the landing we sprinted out through the manicured grass and descended another flight of stairs to the dark tennis court. We kicked up sand, running to the pole that held up the spotlights and she followed me as I climbed up, grabbing the rungs and shimmying a good twenty feet until we were level with the top of the wall that held back the side of the hill that the court was sunk into. I jumped the gap and grabbed onto the fence that ran along the top of the wall and then took Adilyn's hand to steady her as she leapt to follow me, face bright with giddy excitement. We scooted sideways on the narrow edge with backs scraping the rusty metal until we came to a wire cut hole, which we wriggled through to our destination.

"Holy crap," said Adilyn slowly as I gestured at the clearing. The lot next to the building I grew up in was owned by a very poor family. They lived in a cobbled together house largely composed of scrap wood and tin. They had a few chickens, some goats, and about four angry dogs. Behind this little house was tall grass and through the tall grass there was a downward sloping dirt wall where earth was removed during some forgotten construction. That slope of loose dust ended in a patch of flat ground, surrounded on all sides and home to a tree older than the condo and the golf course and the street below.

The roots of this tree were great walls carving gently into the dirt, so deep and broad you could slap a roof across them and call it a house. The couple living in that house could maybe touch fingertips if they spread themselves out tight against the bark, but only just. They could dance in the crook of the branches if they wanted, and the limbs were long and sturdy enough that their children and children's children could all find their own place in them. The tree, the clearing, and the ritual of getting to them was something I had never shown or mentioned to another soul.

It was my most sacred place.

Taking Adilyn by the hand, I led her to a spot on the fresh petrichor ground where we laid down on our backs. The tree had a canopy of leaves that covered us safe like an umbrella, the gaps in the green windows opening to the spread of white dots blinking away in the sky. We did the familiar task of splitting her pink earbuds between us so our faces were held close by the music that we shared and watched float up through the leaves and into the stars.

Somewhere out in the universe, those lights were titan balls of gas great measures brighter than the sun. Because of the limitations of light speed their glow travelled years, some of it centuries to reach Adilyn and I at that moment. We were seeing ancient light from stars that might have died long before either of us was born; light that might have been shining half an infinity away when non-Mormon Jesus walked the earth. Those stars that the light we saw came from, somewhere out there, were not the stars that we were witnessing anymore. They were changed like everything else, but lying there on the damp earth, Adilyn and I could look up and take in those suspended memories of starlight together.

I turned my head so that my nose was almost against her cheek. In silence I watched folded hands on her chest lift and fall softly. I whispered, "I have something to tell you," gravely.

"What is it?" She kept her eyes fixed on the sky.

I let out a deep sigh. "I'm gay. I've been gay this whole time."

There were exactly two seconds of silence and then I felt her punch my shoulder hard.

"Okay fine, that was a lie," I turned back to stare up at it all.

She bounced on the ground, giggling. "Just, why?" she asked.

"Because this is a perfect moment," I said. "And every perfect moment needs a flaw or else it won't seem real when you think back to it. Like, you'll convince yourself that you just made it into something bigger in your head. But I lied about being secretly gay for the last three years and now the rest of this can be perfect forever."

"You're ridiculous," she whispered.

"I think so, actually," I nodded to her. "That's the only explanation, because it's been three years of us undating and I've been waiting for this to peter out and stop altogether. I keep waiting to, like, wake up and not feel like I do about you but the little voices in my head keep shouting, 'Adilyn! Adilyn! Adilyn!'"

"That sounds disturbing."

"It is," I said with a belly laugh. "Straight up, it's disturbing how much I like you. Last year, on New Year's Eve, I came up here by myself and stared up and tried to think about where I want to be out there in the void, next year, or in two years, or ten, and I have zero idea." We were so close then that when folded hands rose with her breaths, her left ear brushed against my nose, still turned to her in warm shadows. "But I want you to be a part of it. At least, I want a chance to really try. Y'know?"

She turned her head so our noses met at the ends. People look funny that close. Like bug aliens because you can't focus your eyes on them and you start to smell that smell of soft skin and the inside of cheeks.

"Everybody keeps leaving," I whispered. "I finally got good at dealing with that and then I met you. So really, you screwed things up for me." I grinned with all my crooked teeth. "But if I had to pick one person to not let go of..." I ushered a hand out to frame the stars with my fingers. "It'd be you."

She leaned in and kissed my forehead there in darkness in that world of our own and she rolled into my chest so I could wrap her up and hold her and watch her rise and fall with my breaths as we whispered softly the words of the song that we shared as it escaped into the universe. I could feel the tingle of her heart beating through our shirts. I inhaled the detergent smell of her and the two of us merged our little bubbles so we were wrapped in this warm pocket made of both of us together on the rain spattered earth.

"It will be different." I could feel her words vibrate through as she spoke with face pressed softly just below my neck. I ran two fingers behind her ear and traced a tendon down to her shoulder as she said, "I promise."

Everything's Not Lost

I became a serial killer because of my mother.

I didn't want to do it. That's what I told our class president and my mom and the director of the senior play. They wanted me to be Jonathan in Arsenic and Old Lace because I had done theater stuff every other year in high school and they needed someone to fill the part of the murderous psychopath. I told our president that I was busy because my grades had taken a bit of a nosedive at the end of last year. I told my mom that things like this were the reason I didn't have friends anymore. I told the director that final rehearsals would conflict with the first few weeks of rugby practice. The truth was that my grades sucked because I stopped caring, I did have friends (but only on Tuesdays), and I had no intention of signing up for another year of rugby. I wanted to be as far away from the try zone as possible. Grades and friends and the senior class play all seemed like polish on the Hindenburg.

Adilyn had spent the summer before our senior year in a pre college business program at Brown University in New York. I didn't hear from her much while she was gone. When I did it was just messages about how great her life was on the other side of the world. She wrote about parties and wealthy adolescent debauchery the likes of which were completely alien to me in my little multilayered missionary-Mecca movie monk bubble. She told me about getting drunk at one in the morning with some rich kid named Aaron.

That's not Adilyn. Adilyn doesn't act like this.

It was the first day of school. I smelled her detergent smell as I woke up from a nap in the senior class hall. I sat up ready with words to fix the gap that time and silence had made between her and I, but she went straight past me to reunite with the Wolfpack. I don't know, maybe she didn't see me lying there. Maybe she was mad at me for not talking to her. Maybe a lot of things.

We had one class together that semester. In it, we would sit together and chat and joke, and it was fine, but we acted too nice to each other to be best friends, let alone whatever we'd been back under the big tree with the pink earbuds and the suspended memories of starlight. With the clock fast running out on high school, I didn't see how I was going to fix the distance before the long looming future would finally be upon us. When that dawned on me everything kind of just became grey. Or black, maybe. I don't know.

—

Meanwhile in the cuckoo's nest, a black dog appears.

Wallace: GET THAT THING OUT OF HERE!

The Stallion: I'm trying!

Wallace: Get off you stupid mutt!

The Stallion: Wallace, I'm sorry. I thought I could stop this.

Aroof!

Wallace: I warned you!

The Stallion: I know. I know, I know, I'm sorry, I just... I just wanted him to be happy.

Wallace: It's... Well... Yeah. So did I.

The Stallion: After middle school I was just so worried that he wouldn't—

Wallace: Me too. It's a risky business we're in, Jason.

The Stallion: It's The... never mind.

BARK!

Wallace: SHUT UP!

The Stallion: How do we get rid of this thing?

Wallace: I don't know if we can. His happiness is all tied up in the girl. Best we can hope for is to try and start disassociating the positive emotions with his memories, dive deep into his hobbies, maybe build a wall. It might not make the dog disappear but as long as it doesn't get any bigger we should prevent a fracture.

The Stallion: What if they got back together?

Wallace: It was a nice dream Jason. But we're awake now and there's work to do.

Awooooooo!

—

I got dengue fever. Dengue fever is a tropical disease spread primarily by mosquitoes. For all intents and purposes of understanding this story just know that it messes you up big time. On my fourth day absent from school, the phone rang at the house as I was vomiting in the bathroom. My mother wound up picking up the line. I wound up passing out in my room. The next day, over breakfast, she informed me that the director of our senior class play had called to ask me to be their serial killer again.

"I told them you said yes," she said. Wrongly convicted prisoners feel less abused by authority than I did then.

"I was unconscious!"

"You need to get out of the house, Daniel."

I looked darkly into the bowl of cereal that I was too nauseated to eat.

"What are you so upset about?"

"I'm a cereal killer now mom, I'm just getting into character."

She smiled. I rolled my eyes. Deep down though I figured she was probably right.

—

The cushion under my head was probably more skin cells than stuffing and a good number of those were probably ones I had left there during the other plays and musicals I'd taken part in over the last few years. School plays were like these little hiatuses that I took from being a film nerd hermit to go socialize and participate in something that I actually didn't suck at. If you're not coordinated, musical, or intellectually magnificent then you don't really get a lot of opportunities for applause. Theater, it turns out, is a rare venue of recognition for people who are really just good at lying to themselves.

I woke up from my post illness, mother-hating slumber because something smelled like a long time ago.

"Hey, bud."

I love you, mom.

It's a testament to just how out of the loop the two of us were at the time that Adilyn and I were equally surprised to see each other in the drama room on that first day of practice. She was, as it happened, the play's student director. It seemed out of character to me until I remembered that to Adilyn the world tended revolve around future college applications. She was on the model United Nations team as well. Find me a person who does model U.N. for any reason other than college applications and I'll show you someone who could use a friend besides the representative from Switzerland.

She sat next to me on that poor, beautiful sofa, and it slumped in the center to bring us closer together. We sat there while our director, Mr. Larson, tried to forge some romantic chemistry between the play's leading man and lady. Adilyn and I, sunk together in the couch, slowly started to talk to each other like we used to. An hour went by. The play didn't gain a whole lot, but I did. The idea that she and I could have ever been strangers became absurd as she told me stories of the idiots she met in New York and how much she'd missed hanging out with me.

—

The character of Jonathan is mostly just in the second act of Arsenic and Old Lace. Mr. Larson, regardless of that fact, scheduled me to come to all the rehearsals, eternally optimistic that we would make more progress than we ever actually did. Under other circumstances this obligation would have soured me like milk in some sort of apocalypse that killed all people with dairy tolerance but every minute of sitting in that carpet stain white wall cubicle of thespians was a minute that I sat closer and closer to Adilyn. During the third rehearsal, she and I spent most of the time lying on our backs next to each other on the floor behind the wonderful, disgusting couch, staring up at ceiling tiles.

"Does that freak you out?" I gestured to the little dots poked into the tiles. You know how ceilings in boring places like schools and offices have those square tiles that are made of the same styrofoamy stuff they use to make Altar Bread? They're always filled with little holes and when you look at them you wonder if at the boring building factory they have to test each tile by seeing how many pencils they can throw up and stick into them before they collapse. Adilyn was afraid of those tiny holes. She was afraid, in fact, of all tiny holes. Trypophobia is the official medical diagnosis but I always just referred to it as, "completely ridiculous."

"Oh my gosh, yes, stop pointing it out." She rolled over onto her stomach so she was looking at my jaw instead of the nightmarish dots above. "You have a beard," she said.

"Yeah."

"Like, a real beard." She scuffed a little of it in her fingers. "How often do you shave?"

I shrugged. "I dunno," I said. Then chuckling, "Why?"

"Nothing. I don't know." She made a little hand pillow under her hair. "It's just, you didn't used to have a beard, that's all."

"I couldn't grow one back then,"

"I guess so."

We lay there; me staring at black dots in white ceiling tiles and her staring at my beard hairs.

"I missed you, bud," she said.

I rolled over onto my side so we could look at each other. It was a much better nose angle for smelling the stale fabric smell of the carpet. "I missed you too."

—

Meanwhile in innerspace the black dog sleeps.

Wallace: I forgot what quiet was like.

The Stallion: It was like as soon as she showed up the dog just backed off.

Wallace: He's got it bad.

The Stallion: So... back to dissociation?

Wallace: You know very well that we'd get nowhere trying to do that with him seeing her every day. It's time to double down, Jason. If we do this right we can get rid of that thing forever.

The Stallion: Couldn't we also screw up and make the dog so big that we won't be able to hold him back?

Wallace: We're not going to screw up. We're going to make this girl fall in love with him.

The Stallion: I just... I don't know Wallace.

Wallace: We have to. You're the romantic Jason, come on. Something about dreams and stars and... all that? I need you.

The Stallion: . . . Will you call me The Stallion?

Wallace: I'll think about it.

The Stallion: Okay.

Fix You

"And do you know what happened?"

Our young Filipino grandma crossed the stage in front of her white sister. "He just stayed under his bed for days and wouldn't be anybody."

For a week and a half we'd been rehearsing on the full set with its staircase and doors and windowsill and wallpaper and paintings and books and all of the things that make a space on a stage a convincing lie about a real house. I loved that stage. It seated just under a thousand people, had a proscenium archway, an orchestra pit, a vertigo inspiring fly gallery, and enough lights to illuminate the city of Reykjavik. It was as professional a venue as most theaters in West End.

I sat next to Adilyn again in the dark audience ready to take her hand and share pink earbuds when I realized she had been crying. I whispered, "Are you okay?" in my psychopath makeup.

She nodded her head a little and gave me a big, sniffling smile. When Adilyn was pretty upset she got angry. She would yell and curse and go,

urrrgh!

and stick her fingers in her cloud of hair and she would talk without me needing to say anything and I could listen and eventually she would be done talking and I could say how much whatever it was sucked. That was easy.

When Adilyn was truly, deeply upset, however, she got quiet. For the longest time I didn't know what to do with that. I would sneak chocolate into her bag and slip funny notes in her locker and pat her back and tell her everything would be okay and those things would make her smile a sniffling smile and stay silent and I would know I hadn't fixed whatever was wrong. We were on Skype one day, however, and Adilyn was being quiet and I was getting desperate to make her feel better so I tried to do the thing that made me feel better when I was upset: I cracked my knuckles at the keyboard and wrote her a story.

And it worked.

I made it my job after that to stitch the loose pieces of her back together through sheer force of narrative whenever the need arose. That day in the dark of Cadd Theater I knew that whatever was wrong was big. It was bigger than the times before it and this time I didn't have a Skype window or a keyboard to fight with. I sat in silence with her, totally helpless, and went on stage when I was called and forgot some of my lines as I churned in my head a plan to make her happy again.

—

I colored furiously. I stapled and pasted on a table in the cafeteria before rehearsals began. Lenna and a wonderful girl named April walked in and asked me what I was doing. I wasn't sure what to say. No one knew about Adilyn and I because if they did then her parents would too.

I guess.

That's why she'd told me not to say anything anyway. Secret crab. But Lenna was Adilyn's best friend and April and I hung out in ethics class and I didn't know what to else tell them.

"It's for Adilyn," I said, pasting another paragraph on top of one of my illustrations.

"Did you draw all of these?" asked April, flipping through the pictures. I nodded. "Oh-my-goodness gracious Daniel Foutz this is flippin' crazy."

I gathered the papers together to staple them into the completed cover.

"You must really love her," said Lenna.

I looked her in the eyes, ready to lie and then said, "Yeah. I think I do," before I could stop myself.

There was something in my head that had appeared over the summer. I pictured it as this little black mass that would sometimes ooze something out into my brain and make me suspicious that everyone around really hated me. It filled me up with this belief that all the bad stuff would always be bad and nothing would ever get better. That's what it felt like; this chemical secreting thing that had just shown up one day to make me crazy. To make me depressed.

Only sometimes it would work the other way around. All of the sudden I would feel incredible and energized and I would go out and jog for miles along Manila highways dodging traffic cars and dancing to music. But after highs like that, it wouldn't be long before I would crash back in my room and retreat into movies or books or porn or something to try and make myself feel less lonely until I could talk to Adilyn again. She could make the thing in my brain stop.

No one else could do that.

Whatever the thing was, it made me feel like if people knew that I had feelings for Adilyn then it would be like getting busted and a spotlight would shine and sirens would go off and shotgun relationship enforcers would tell me to put my emotions down and walk away. That's what I was expecting from Lenna and April after admitting this thing to them. But they just stood there smiling.

April said, "Daniel that's great." Lenna nodded.

Slowly I smiled and asked, "You think she'll like it?"

—

She did.

"Once there was a beautiful princess named Adilynia." I sat and read to her awe-beaming face in the audience seats. "And a candlemaker named Danlipuddle."

The story was about a princess whose job it is to make everyone in her kingdom happy. They come to her every day with problems and she makes them feel wonderful and special. The princess gets her energy from this magic flower and one day it wilts and she becomes sad and the kingdom gets mad at her so she takes the magic luminescent Bone of Finding on a journey through the Forest of Dark Scary Holes with her trusty dinosaur friend, Sterence in search of a new one. Danlipuddle, and his not so magical carpet, Fleeb, follow the Princess and her glowing bone from a distance through the trials and terrors of the woods and he tries to help in little ways without her noticing and he leaves behind a trail of his melting candles. They pass through thorns and hip hop dance battling trolls and many terrifying porous things.

Finally, when the Princess reaches the flower deep in the woods, her Bone of Finding goes dark and she becomes lost. She sits on a rock, unable to go any further, and so Sterence leaves to find help and runs into Danlipuddle lagging behind in the shadows and he leads him back to her. Danlipuddle sits next to the princess on the rock and puts a hand on her back.

"You've come all of this way to make those ungrateful villagers happy again," I read slowly. "You were scared and you got hurt and you didn't have to but you did. You came all of this way for them. You're so brave. I can't do what you do," I said to her. "I can't take on so many people's problems and be the beautiful, Shakira-haired source of happiness for everyone. But I've left a trail of my candles. So if I may princess, my lights will guide you home... and ignite your bone." I looked into the eyes of real life Adilyn and said, "And I will try anything—anything—I can, to fix you."

So the two make it back to the kingdom and the princess brings joy to everyone again and they live happily ever after.

"The end," I read.

The way she looked at me when I finished that dumb little book with her watery eyes brown enormous behind glasses? Nothing was like that. Nothing was ever like that look. It filled the missing time and space in an instant and up until that point I didn't know if I really knew what love was, but with those tears and that look and the feeling in my chest and the Someday maybe looming in the future... what else, I wondered, could that have been?

—

The play opened. I strutted and fretted out on stage in my serial killer makeup so I could steal back into the wings and lie on my stomach next to Adilyn between the curtains. We watched actors' heads cross in front of the window in the scenery as behind us shadows of stagehands came and went. Each performance, lying there, I turned a thought in my rotisserie brain so that on the show's last night, when intermission came and the lights dimmed onstage, I was ready to share it.

I took her hand as the Sarasate strings played out of speakers and the murmurous tide of crowd voices broke and crashed softly against the canvas barrier. I led her to center stage where we were alone in the lie of a living room set. I bowed, and then we danced in the pale blue scene setter's light, remembering steps I'd learned from Youtube on our first date seventy-two million seconds ago. One box step, box two three, spin two three, prom en ade... We stood close enough that she had to look up from under her hair to see my eyes looking down through horn rimmed prop glasses.

"I have to go soon," she said softly.

"I know," I said as we continued dancing. "But not yet."

The two of us stayed there swaying until human voices woke us from the speakers, calling the audience back to their seats. I followed her into the curtains as she found her headset.

There's kind of a bad movie starring Forest Whitaker called, Ghost Dog. He plays a recluse bodyguard who lives by a book called, The Way of the Samurai. One of the rules in the book is that you must make all of your decisions within the space of seven breaths. Like I said, it's cheesy, but I loved that line anyway. So whenever I wanted to do something scary and didn't want the ability to talk myself out of it, I started counting my breaths, and in this contract with myself I was bound to act before drawing an eighth. As people moved to their marks and the house lights went down I released my seventh breath and faced Adilyn.

"I want there to be a someday," I said. "I want us to be continued. I don't want to be just some guy you knew in high school and I don't want to go to one place and you to another and never see you again. I am in love with you," I struggled to make the words strong in whispers. "I love you, Adilyn Chan. I know it's big and scary and far away and I don't know so many things but in a few months we'll finish high school and you're free to date whoever you want and I want to be the guy, Adilyn. I know that nobody stays with someone from school and if someone else told me that they felt like this about someone I would tell them to forget it. I would tell them it's not realistic. I would tell them that because I cannot believe that other people feel the way about other people the way that I feel about you. I will go wherever I have to go so that you and I can be together if you want that too." My heart was beating so fast as the curtains opened and I risked missing my cue. "I know you're scared but I'm asking you a question and I'm looking for an answer this time. A real one. So, Adilyn," I breathed. "Do you want there to be a someday?"

This was the first longest pause of my life.

She covered the mic piece of her headset so she could speak to only me and no one else. She nodded, saying, "To be continued."

The last lines of the play were said. I pulled Adilyn out from the curtains and gave her a bouquet of flowers as the crowd applauded the performance. The lights went down. The costumes came off with the makeup and we broke down the lie of a house into splinters and boards and a couple of doors to nowhere.

The Escapist

These were my weekends.

I weaved through rumbling metal hulks in tattered New Balance sneakers, breathing in more of the familiar taste of diesel fumes than actual oxygen. Practice and will power got me from the street stalls selling pirated DVDs to the ripped up pleather of the last row of the Green Line bus where black marker seatback words offered numbers for drugs and sex. A man with three teeth and a large wicker basket walked up and down the center aisle proffering peanuts seasoned with gas emissions on some crumbled nub of sidewalk. An LCD TV mounted at the front of the bus projected static with occasionally received chunks of Tagalog reality television. Everything smelled like sticking your nose in a McDonald's booth cushion.

We oozed down the road like a tenured English professor's lecture on War and Peace; slowly and in a manner impossible to stay conscious of for long. It would all have been overwhelming save for the earbuds that attached me to a universe of musical notes and people singing about things that made my quest seem somehow more important and which conjured up the idea of an Adilyn, somewhere, connected by her own pink earbuds to the same songs. Lights of a million cars and a thousand city buildings streamed past my scarred up window before I stepped off at the gate to the closed community of fancy houses where she lived. I couldn't go in there. My destination was the shopping mall/hotel across the street where she and I had laid on our backs and shared music for the first time. It was as close as I could get. For the moment.

I couldn't go to her house because of her whole parents hating romance secret crab deal, so I walked and rode and waited in that mall. I did this every weekend. On the bus I would send her a text, telling her I would be hanging out at Robinsons and if she wanted to she could stop by. You know, playing it cool like I just happened to be there. Most times she was out with the Wolfpack or doing homework or mediating drama between her melodramatic friends or something. That was fine. It was fine. If there was one thing I was used to by my senior year of high school it was watching movies by myself.

After the credits I read in a little coffee shop in the part of the mall that was perpetually being renovated. There, with my caffeine and concrete dust, I read the books that Adilyn loved, which were mostly John Green novels but also older ones, like The Great Gatsby stretching across the water to that far away light, or Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, wandering aimlessly through a world too big for him. Each book she recommended became my new favorite and she would loan me her copies with little notes that she'd scribbled in for me to find. It was almost like being with her. It helped calm down the thing in my brain, which had been getting slowly worse since the play had ended.

Those lost weekends were fair investments for the times when she did show up. They were few and far between but few and far between was better than none and distant, which had more or less become the state of things between us. I guess to be continued hadn't started yet. I'd buy us coffee at Starbucks (not wanting to take her to my dusty loner café) and we would sit and talk and maybe walk and hold hands for a little while. I could tell from those nights that the Something Wrong from the play was still bothering her. I tried hard to make her feel special and cared about over a plate of crêpes or in the movie chair next to me but she would never tell me precisely what was going on.

"Did you have a good time at the mall?" my mom would ask when I got home late at night.

"Yeah," I would say. Then I'd collapse into my bed, completely exhausted.

—

Meanwhile in the Fortress of Solitude...

The Stallion: How long can we keep this going?

Wallace: Ssh! Don't wake it up.

The Stallion: Wallace, we've been working nonstop since the play.

Wallace: And we'll keep working. If they don't keep getting together then that thing will tear this place apart.

The Stallion: What have we done?

Wallace: He's dependent. His happiness hinges on Adilyn. Come on, we need to work on our strategy to get him through the next week.

The Stallion: I don't know if I can keep my eyes open.

Wallace: I know. But either we're awake or that thing is. We can do this. I can't. Not alone.

The Stallion: I'm sorry. This wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for me.

Wallace: We were both responsible.

The Stallion: I thought things would... be different. You know? She said things would be different.

Wallace: You're closing your eyes, Jason, snap out of it.

The Stallion: Just biding time, Wall... some point a little won't be enough. That thing just keeps... growing and... growing...

Wallace: Jason get up!

Rrrrrr...

Wallace: Oh nonono. Back to sleep, dog. Come on shh shh shh, it's okay. Jason? Jason please I can't—

AROOF!

ROFF!

Wallace: No—no down! Bad dog! GET DOWN! JASON! STOP! JASON WAKE UP! JAS—

WROOF!

—

"What happened to your knuckles?"

April was next to me in Ethics class as we watched the others cheat on the test we had been given. I don't know if our teacher ever discovered the irony of that but regardless she gave out a lot more A's than she should have.

I looked down at the red lined bruises on the peaks of the fist around my pencil. I looked up at April's blue happy eyes and I said, "They had a collision," quietly.

She looked at me looking at her and silently the top halves of our faces communicated the more honest answer to her question.

"Is this about Adilyn?" she asked.

"What?"

"Huh? What?" she mimicked me with a low stupid voice. "Come on, Daniel Foutz."

"Everything's okay," I said.

She raised an eyebrow at my knuckles. "Yeah, clearly it's all hunky dory."

"It's..." I sighed.

I considered telling her about how I felt tired. How I was becoming more and more jealous of the amount of time Peter got to spend with Adilyn. About the thing in my brain. April had always been so nice to me. I trusted her.

"It's fine," I said. "Really, it's fine."

Seeing something in my words she put a hand on my arm. I jerked it back like I'd been shocked. Just for a second. It was surprising was all. Getting touched by a girl was different. It was like, softer. I didn't know what it was softer than exactly. Everything I guess.

—

We stood outside Adilyn's house away from the noise and music. I was leaving her birthday party early because the Wolfpack was around and swimming and I didn't want to take off my shirt and stand in a pool next to Peter, whose pectoral muscles were a C cup easily. I was built like a bleached Q-tip.

I handed her the present. She pulled out the shirt first.

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe!" she exclaimed, reading the words.

"I tried to find one the same color that it says she wore in the book," I said, referring to John Green's young adult cancer romance novel, The Fault in Our Stars.

"You mean the girly book that you were way 'too manly' to read?"

"Okay okay, I was wrong."

"Did you cry?" she asked.

I guffawed. "Umm, never."

"Did you?"

"Maybe like a little."

She smiled huge, holding up the shirt under the streetlight. "You're amazing," she said. "Thank you."

"Well, dude, open the rest of it first."

She pulled the vinyl album from the bag. "Wakey Wakey! What? Where did you get this?"

I smiled. "Read the note inside."

"...Dear Mr. Foutz. We would like you to have this copy of our album as a thank you for the work you did on the music video..." She stared up in disbelief. "Holy shit, Daniel I can't take this, it's way too much. They wanted you to have this. You worked so hard animating that thing."

I had been entertaining my dreams of making films by doing freelance videos online. "I only even knew about that song because of you," I said. "That album is the thing I have that makes me think I could maybe do something some day. It's like my dreams on vinyl. I want you to keep it. For good. Okay?"

She nodded. "Okay."

I should have kissed her that night.

The way she lingered with me under the light while her party happened behind her, I should have kissed her. We had never kissed. I should have kissed her, but I didn't. I said happy birthday and walked out to catch a familiar bus back home and went to sleep so so tired.

—

Somewhere amidst the dark fur...

The Stallion: Wallace? Where are you? Wallace! Wall—oh... Wallace, what did it do to you?

Wallace: Tried to—huuuuh—stop it.

The Stallion: Is that your blood?

Wallace: Heh... Yeah. Some of it.

The Stallion: I'm so sorry.

Wallace: Nothing you could do. It's too—ooh ah ah ah—yeesh. It's too strong.

The Stallion: It's alright Wallace. I can stay awake, I promise. We'll work hard, you'll look at the numbers, we'll find a way. We can beat this thing. We can still win!

Wallace: It's not about winning anymore. It's about—gah-aah!—surviving...

The Stallion: Wallace? Wallace? . . . That's fine. That's fine, you just rest now, pal. You just hang on. I think I have a plan. I'll fix this. Just hang on.

Moving to Mars

It was Tuesday so I had friends.

We were sitting on the carpet in Jon's living room for Bible study. Jon had been my rugby coach back when I was in rugby. He also ran the yearbook, which this guy named Callum and I were co-editors of. Jon was also the school's guidance counsellor. And he had three elementary school boys. And he was a scuba instructor. Oh right, and he used to work for NASA. So yeah, we pretty much all thought he was the greatest.

Six bowls of chicken sat in front of us in our little circle. There was Jon, Callum, me, Joe from the swings in elementary school with the F word brother, Phil from Alaska who had hiked up Mt. Pulag with me the summer before, and David with muscles like baby heads. We had all been meeting at Jon's every Tuesday that year. A few months earlier we'd gone on a camping trip to this island where we ate hermit crabs that we'd hunted in caves and there was a typhoon and we were stranded on the beach all wet and miserable and Joe nearly died of dehydration and we'd made it back on the ferry the next day just in time to get him to the hospital where we left him so we could go see The Dark Knight Rises.

That was a different kind of friendship.

I didn't talk to those guys about Adilyn or being tired or the thing in my head or... well any of that stuff. I didn't spend much time with any of them outside of Tuesdays because I always retreated home to laptop movies after school and the mall on weekends hoping to see her. But they were still great friends to me. They really were.

I saw Callum and Jon more than the others because of yearbook, so I guess if I had best friends besides Adilyn then those two were it. If you were just meeting Callum, you would assume that he hated most people and things and that the thing he loved most was telling you that he hated the things that you loved. He was six feet and one thousand inches tall and I'd long thought that he actually descended from some super-tall alien species of giant sarcastic asses who just walk around on enormous legs and crap on people who worship them as gods. Most days Callum greeted me by saying something like, "What's up, douche?" and then he'd wrap a huge bicep around my neck and choke me while whispering right into my ear that he was going to do all sorts of things to my butt. He was the perfect friend.

No, really.

Even on days when the thing in my brain made life worse and told me that everyone hated me, I still knew that he didn't. He might insult and punch me or whatever but then we'd be sitting there not working on the yearbook and we would listen to this crazy band called Deerhoof and their weird Google Translate lyrics and we knew all the words and we would sing along badly and he would talk about how life sucked.

And you know what?

Life did suck a lot of the time. Everyone else was cool pretending like they didn't think that too but not Callum. He was honest, and he and I and Deerhoof sat in the suck and we laughed about it because it was hilarious to us how terrible things were and how everyone just acted like that wasn't true. It was like a huge joke that no one would acknowledge. I thought maybe Callum had something in his head a little bit like the thing in mine, so I felt less crazy when I was with him.

Jon was the other side of the friendship coin. He was eternally positive and constantly uplifting and making me believe I could do all sorts of things and saying he saw the video I made or read the thing I wrote for my creative writing class and that it was awesome and I should write more and I might actually be great at it even though I definitely wasn't. I didn't mention Adilyn or the thing in my brain or whatever but somehow he still had a knack for popping in at the right times with a funny story about something stupid one of the underclassmen had done or with a book recommendation or just anything that wasn't the stuff in my head.

Most of all I liked Bible studying with Jon because he knew a lot about God and the Bible but he also knew a lot about science and space and I was more and more wondering about Jesus and if he was really all that much more believable than Mormon Jesus. The way I figured it, if a guy as bright as Jon was willing to give up a career with NASA to come work as a missionary and be paid no money then there had to be something to this faith thing.

"Dude, where do you go?" Callum asked, slurping down the last of his Firebutt chicken. We called it that because of hot sauce and, y'know, the circulatory system.

"I'm around," I said.

"Nonono," he said. "Here." He shoved a stuffed animal at me. "There. Now you have the truth walrus and you have to tell us where you go hiding."

"I'm not hiding," I lied. I threw the walrus at his head. "Your turn. Is it true that you're actually three leprechauns in a trench coat?"

David sneezed chicken out his nose laughing and then started watering at the eyes and rolling on the ground from the hot sauce and we were all cracking up and Callum put me in a headlock effortlessly and I could, like, feel the air being squeezed out of my lungs as he put his knees on my back. David splashed water from his cup into his nose and Jon just shook his head and kept eating because this was all pretty much par for the course.

"Where do you go!" Callum demanded from on top of me. I wheezed through my crushing trachea and reached across the floor, managing to get hold of the truth walrus, which I then threw at Joe. It landed in his chicken.

"Okay, seriously?" he said, wiping the animal off on his pants.

I tapped out against Callum's whalebone ribcage. "Joe. Why don't you break up with your girlfriend?"

Even David calmed down enough to murmur in agreement at that. Joe just shook his head and passed the walrus to Jon without a word. I brought this up pretty much every week. It wasn't that we didn't like his girlfriend but I think it's just a lot easier to tell that two people are awful for each other when you're not one of those people. Anyway, it got Callum to leave me alone.

"So," said Jon, mercifully changing course. "Say there's a rocket outside about to launch to Mars..."

As Jon spoke we reformed our circle. Callum did the thing where he pointed to his eyes and then pointed to my eyes and mouthed the words, "I'm watching you."

"There's a sweet Mars base up there already and food and all that jazz you need to live. The catch is that if you get in the rocket to go to Mars, you can never come back to earth. Would you go?"

"Nope," said Joe, still picking stuffed walrus fur out of his bowl. "What's the point? I mean, sure, Mars would be cool for a while but you'd get bored."

"You have an infinite library of movies and books and video games and the food is always new and amazing and the air has drugs in it to keep you happy," said Jon.

"Could you talk to people on earth?" asked Phil. He had characteristically sat and giggled at the rest of us and our chaos from the sidelines.

"Nope."

"Then no way," said Phil. "What would the purpose of your life be?"

"What if the world was flooding?" Jon looked at each of us individually. "Slowly. But what if in five or ten or fifty years everything on earth would be underwater and staying would mean having to live through all of that? Constant rain and more and more places and people disappearing forever."

We all took a moment to ingest this.

"Is God real on Mars?" I asked finally.

Jon tilted his head to the side. "Would that change your answer?"

"It might."

"Okay then. Let's say God doesn't exist if you go to Mars."

"But He does if I stay?"

"Well I guess that depends on if you believe that or not."

Phil raised an eyebrow at me. "Why would you want God not to exist on Mars?"

I took a bite of chicken. "Luck, em nut suyuh I wunt thu bu I myun—huld un." I swallowed. "If I cut myself off from everybody by running away to Mars then God would be mad, right? So I'd be scared to leave because I would be worried about being punished for it when I die."

"But why go to Mars at all?"

"Because the world is flooding!" I defended. "I don't know, like, it just seems like that would make it all not worth it. Knowing that all of it was just temporary and going away and everyone and everything would die. What's the point? I'd rather go and live it up on Mars by myself than sit here and wait for everyone to leave."

Callum raised a hand.

"Yes, Callum." Jon called on him like we were all in a kindergarten class.

"If Daniel goes to Mars, can I go with him?"

"Oh dude, never mind I'll stay and drown," I said.

"Bro," he said locking eyes with me. "If you're a Martian, I'm a Martian."

After that we kind of left the topic and went on to talk about the book of Isaiah, but that image of a rocket ship waiting outside stuck with me.

For a long time actually.

Warning Sign

"Why would a god do that?"

Pi Patel asked the question up on the movie screen. "Why would he send his own son to suffer for the sins of ordinary people?" My pocket rumbled part way through and I left the theater because I knew it was Adilyn. A call from no one else could have removed me from Life of Pi.

"Yellow?"

"Daniel." I could hear the vaguest hint of tears in her voice.

"Yes, madam?"

"You're amazing."

"They're just donuts." I was referring to the box I had left with her maid.

"But you came all the way on a school night and you wrote the note and drew that picture inside the box. Did you come just because of what I said on Skype?"

The great and terrible Something Wrong had gotten worse over the last few days and that night she'd scared me with the way she had been writing.

"You said things were really bad."

"Come over," she said.

"But won't your parents—"

"Come over," she insisted. "Please."

"As you wish."

—

When I came in, they served me ox tongue. Like, they served me a dish of gourmet ox tongue. That's how rich her family was. I chewed on tongue and they sat down at the table and we talked and they were actually super nice. I liked them. As far as I could tell they seemed to like me too. After a while Adilyn asked if she and I could go out on a walk together and they said that would be fine.

That would be fine!

I thought I was going to be reamed out and inspected and tossed to the curb but they were fine with me walking at night alone with their daughter. As we left I wondered if maybe this could be the start of the Someday. If maybe I wouldn't have to be so tired anymore.

We meandered the bends of the dollhouse neighborhood. It was kind of a surreal thing that a peaceful little cluster of expensive houses like that existed right in the bowels of the screaming city of Manila. We went and sat on some swings in a little park under the moon and I watched her face staring quietly into the distance. I wanted to kiss her more than I wanted to breathe.

But I didn't. I just sat and watched her and played the idea of kissing her in my head like super eight footage.

"I'm sorry you didn't get accepted to your college, Adilyn. I know how much it means to you. You worked so hard." I pushed myself slowly back and forward with my sneaker in the dirt. "If they just knew how good a student you are."

She snorted.

"Dude, you are so smart! Your grades are way better than mine, are you kidding?"

"Yeah well... they're not good enough for my mom." She made this angry grunting noise and added, "And the way she looked at me? When she found out I didn't make it, she was like, 'Well I knew this would happen.' She didn't say, 'I'm sorry, honey' or, 'I know you did your best.' It was just, 'Hey there's my fuck-up daughter.' Like WHAT do I have to do to... just... AGH!" she kicked her pink shoe into the ground, scattering concrete sand.

"Adilyn, I'm sorry—"

"And Lenna? I tried to talk to her about it and she was just whining about this stupid boy like it's the most important thing in the world and I'm trying to talk to her and nothing gets through!" She was shouting out in front of her; not to me or to anyone, really, just at the street and the dark. "It's like everyone I know is only my friend because of what they can suck out of me. Like parasites, I mean, does anyone actually like me for me or am I just a good person to come and bitch to?"

"I actually—"

She squeezed her face between her palms and said, "Why am I such a screwup?"

"Hey." I put a hand on her back. "What are you talking about? This isn't your fault."

"Yes it is." Her words came out a little choked. "It's my fault. I'm not good enough. Shit... shit. I'm not good enough!" Her face was all blurry red with hair scattered out like an expanding storm cloud and this black hate in her eyes and bare teeth and tears and lines of spit connecting her lips. She became this otherperson that I didn't recognize. "Shit. I'm sorry for swearing, Daniel. God..."

"It's okay Adilyn, just—"

"I'm such a mess," she said in a quieter voice. "No wonder they all hate me."

"Nobody hates you."

"Yes they do. They should! I hate me!" she yelled. "God hates me!"

"What are you talking about? No one hates you, why are you saying that?" I felt as I tried to calm her down that we were talking about something else now. "I don't hate you," I said. "I mean, I love you. That has to count for something, right? And even if you don't make it into the college here, your backup is in Vancouver, right? If you go there then I can go to Trinity Western like my dad and my sister and we'd be like, right next to each other. To be continued? Doesn't that make it just a tiny bit better?"

She didn't say anything.

"I love you," I said again.

We sat on swings without motion with my dropped gauntlet in the concrete dust between us.

"Why?" She stared ahead into the nothing. "Why do you love me Daniel?"

"Because—"

"What could you possibly love about me? I'm this broken, messed person screaming and crying because she didn't make it into her rich princess school. How could you love me?"

"Adilyn—"

"You don't even know me," she said like a punch to the chest.

I clenched my back molars to fight my tear ducts, asking, "What do you mean?"

"There's so much you don't even know about me."

"So tell me then!" I yelled at her. Then softer, "You can tell me anything."

She looked at me with a sad, dopey grin. "No. I can't."

"I promise. Whatever it is you can say it."

"Secrets," she said ominously.

"What?"

"Secret crab."

"I promise."

"...You wouldn't like me," she said to nothing in particular. "You wouldn't talk to me again and I can't stand the thought of you not liking me. Because I'm selfish," she added. "Like, you want to talk about Jesus and I always change the subject. Isn't that messed up? I mean, I'm supposed to be Christian, but I hate talking about Jesus and God because I'm a bad person. I'm a bad person and I swear so much and you never swear and I lie. I lie all the time constantly to everybody. Sometimes there isn't even a reason, I just lie and I think, 'why did I just do that?'" She looked at me with a pity and said, "You're so good. You're so good and I'm not good. I'm not good, Daniel. There are so many good girls in our class and I'm not good. You're like... perfect," she said. "You're always there for me and I don't deserve... just—" She looked into my eyes and said gravely, "You should find someone else to love. Because at some point you're going to figure out what everyone else has, and then you'll hate me too."

Her words made spiderweb cracks over the surface of my heart.

"I'm messed up too, Adilyn," I said weakly.

"No. See, no you're not, Daniel. You don't get it. All I do is hurt you and you have no idea."

"I'm not a good person," I insisted. "I'm not perfect. Nobody's perfect. I do messed up stuff too."

"Like what?"

"Like the—you know like the porn."

"So you watch porn! You told me all about this Daniel. You told me because you felt guilty about having seen porn and liking me. Do you know how many guys watch porn? It's, like, all of them. The fact that you felt so guilty that you had to confess it to me, I mean—"

"It's not just pictures of strangers," I said, cutting her off. "Sometimes it's Facebook profiles." This was the black locked pit of guilt I was dragging up and opening to argue with her. "Like people that you and I both know," I said. "Not you though," I added quickly. "I could never disrespect you like that but these others girls I mean—how could you possibly say I'm perfect?"

She turned, and for a second her red angry face got this smile on it like you smile at a kid crying because he spilt milk on the ground. "You're still the good guy at the end of your story," she said. "You're trying to change. I'm not."

My mouth hung open looking for an answer to that and I just said, "But you could. We can all change." I wanted so much not to cry. "Everyone does messed up things sometimes. I'm not better than you, it's not some sliding scale."

She just looked at me through crooked strands of hair loose from hands digging through in fury.

"I need you," I said. "There is nothing you could ever tell me about yourself that could possibly make me hate you."

"You don't know."

"No, you don't know." I countered. "Because you aren't in love with me and I am in love with you."

This was the second longest pause of my life. Empires have risen and fallen in less time than I waited for her to respond.

"Daniel, I—" She pulled in a breath and released it. There was no end to that sentence. I mean there was but it wasn't one that she needed to say for me to hear.

"That's fine, Adilyn," I said. "I understand. I get it."

"I just don't know what... I don't know."

"It's fine," I said.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry." The words were drained but I meant them. "I just want you to be happy."

She walked her swing sideways toward me and set her head down on my shoulder. "I'm sorry," she said again. "You make me happy. Really. I'm sorry."

I pushed my face down into the loose storm of hair leaning into me and put my arms around her. "You make me happy too."

A little while later the worn down bus dragged me to the big golf ball and I slouched my sore legs home to collapse into sleep. I was so very tired.

The World Turned Upside Down

This is how it all collapsed.

danster237: How long has this been going on?

xTheScientistx: about three years

danster237: Fuck.

The word was typed like a seal; something indelible that would mark that moment as permanent and irreversible. I realized then that I had never used it before because I had been saving it for a moment worse than all the ones that preceded it. A few more messages were sent after that but I was only bodily connected to the planet at that point, my mind floating somewhere with a little fish telling me to swim.

danster237: I'm going to leave now

xTheScientistx: what do you mean?

danster237: I mean I'm leaving.

xTheScientistx: what? where? you can't I'll call your parents. Please just talk to me.

danster237: what would you tell them exactly? You want to call your principal and tell him you've been cheating on his son for three years? That you've been having sex with some guy at school and that's why I'm gone?

xTheScientistx: we didn't have sex it wasn't cheating just hold on and let me explain daniel please

danster237: Do you feel the way about him that you feel about me?

The third longest long pause.

xTheScientistx: yes

danster237: Goodbye Adilyn.

I don't know what she wrote after that. My cellphone buzzed in my pocket as I gathered loose items in my room, careful not to wake my sleeping parents next door. I had to go. I didn't know where or for how long or what I was going to do but this is what I did know:

Adilyn lied.

Adilyn was the lie. At least the Adilyn that I thought I knew. So when I finally pulled the phone out of my pocket and read her pleas for me not to do anything to myself it was to an uncanny stranger that I texted:

I am very upset but whatever happens to me tonight isnt your fault. I love you.

You're the worst thing that never happened to me

Goodbye Adilyn

I got swallowed up in the deep city, wanting to get mugged or beaten or stabbed or something. I wanted to fight back with every ounce of my dumped out rage until that was empty like the rest of me. I wanted to fight. I wanted to fight and I wanted to lose. I wanted someone to make me look on the outside like I felt on the inside.

Because there was no Someday.

At first I tried listening to music, but all of those words in those songs about love and time and promises were just really pretty lies. So I pulled out the earbuds and walked and thought about how it had been bad for a long time. About the thing in my brain. About being tired. About the closet in my room that I would go home and scream into after school while the house was empty. About cutting little notches in my chest with a razor back in December. I thought about how I did those things because when you scream or bleed or cry, you leak out a little of the stuff that you cannot say. "I'm fine" was this quotidian lie of mine; a tragic mendacity that became heavier with each, "not now but someday" scrawled out in Adilyn's insta-words. I'd been ripping off pieces of myself to patch her holes because if she sank then so would I. But I'd been in the water the whole time.

There was no Someday.

I walked and passed a billboard that said,

Jesus loves you.

Well who the hell was Jesus? Why wouldn't he talk to me? Jesus had left. Jesus went away. He was gone like everyone else. I certainly didn't feel at that moment the tingly mysterious "Jesus power" that I was expected to rely on. I thought these things and walked and became scared.

I didn't want to be damned.

I didn't want to believe in more lies.

That night I would've gotten on the rocket to Mars. I would have done it just to know something for sure. I could go up in godless space and finally be far enough away from the raining suck that covers everything down here and the thing in my brain would stop with the drugs and there would be no more people leaving. I'd be the one who left. They'd cry because I was gone off into the sunset and fuck them and their something wrongs. I'd been right the first time in the rain with the sneakers. I shouldn't have let people walk away with pieces of me.

I had a sudden rush of bipolar panic and stammered mental apologies to God, if God was real. The hypocrisy and fear of that balled up as this frustration in my gut that I screamed out down the highway. I stood on the yellow line down the dark asphalt and let loose all of the things I was trying to feel at the same time in a throat ripping roar. It was the biggest thing I could possibly do.

and it was still so small

A few moments later some drunk guy screamed back at me. I got off the road and thought of myself, Idiot. I was a rich white kid screaming in Manila like his problems were big enough to share with a city that went to bed with starving people dying and a million things more tragic than the lies I'd been told and the ones I told myself.

I kept walking.

No one killed or beat or stabbed me. There was no great big answer out there. In a movie, my walk would have taken me to an old man who would have lead me off on an adventure or to some epiphanous metaphor or my tragic demise and rolling credits.

But it wasn't like that.

It was just a loop.

It was just a dumb, ten mile circle back to apartment 503, and she had still lied and I still wanted to disappear and I still didn't know what to do about that and still the thing in my head. I went to bed in time for my mom to wake me up twenty minutes later for school.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

And I said, "I'm fine."

But there was no Someday.

There never had been.

—

...

ROWF!

ROOF!

AROOF!

AWOOO!

I Ran Away

Everything was on mute.

My parents in the front seat mouthed words at each other and the car engine pumped pistons like soft ballerina footfalls as the tires dipped into cushioned potholes and we rolled on in the silent world up the school road. The creaky metal gate didn't creak and the keys turning in the ignition didn't clink and the doors opened noiselessly to a campus of hush hush people all miming conversations with their padded sneakers and soundless high fives. Outside was quiet.

But inside my head was deafening.

Every synapse and hemisphere and pink mottle of brain was screaming, shaking and vibrating my skull with a roar that only I could hear and all of the sounds were grinding out the same two words again and again like a skipping CD.

NO SOMEDAY

NO SOMEDAY

NO SOMEDAY

But somehow I could still hear my gentle,

knock knock

on Jon's office door and then his voice saying, "Hey Dan what's—whoah is everything okay?" as he went and shut it behind me. "Daniel? Here sit down."

I did.

I was like the walking dead in there, staring blankly into space all groggy from no sleep and with the soup of bad stuff sloshing around my head.

"Are you okay?"

I tried to get myself killed last night. Slowly I was able to realize that fact as the inside finally muffled.

"Adilyn's been dating another guy for the last three years."

Jon's mouth opened and he looked at me with this crestfallen empathy and said, "Daniel," and let go of a long breath as he sat down across from me, running his fingers through his hair and saying, "Oh man, Daniel. I'm... dude, I'm sorry."

When I got to the part where she had said that she cared about this other guy like she cared about me there were tears in my eyes. I hadn't cried in front of a guy since I was in elementary school.

"That just... that really really sucks," he said.

And it was true.

It was the only thing he could say because it was the only really true thing.

"Yeah." I let out a sigh and looked up at the fluorescent bulb on the ceiling. "The worst is that I—" My voice caught for a second and I stared at the wall to try and keep myself from crying more. "I don't know," I said honestly. "I just trusted her, I guess. She's my best friend. If she could do this to me for so long then... I don't know. It doesn't even matter."

briiiiiiiing!

The second period bell.

"Okay, so it definitely does matter," said Jon. "Oh, Daniel. Do you wanna hang out here? I'll write you a note to get you out of class. We could say I'm helping you find a college."

I gave him a small smile. "Thanks," I said, standing up and rubbing a sleeve over my eyes. "But I don't wanna just sit here. Also, I already have a college. I'm going to that Bible School. I decided."

"The one in Germany?"

"Yeah. That's sounding pretty good right now. Anyway, I'll see you later." I opened the door.

"Hey? Are you going talk to Adilyn?"

"Yeah," I said. "When I can." That's all I really wanted to do. "She didn't show up today."

"Just, wait a while, okay? I think she... well I just think you should wait. She has an effect on you."

I snorted. "Yeah... Yeah, no kidding."

—

I was in shop class trying to arc weld two pieces of metal together. Behind the partition, with the gloves and the thick apron and the mask on, I couldn't see anything except for when the welding torch made the incendiary connection with the plates and the sparks appeared through the visor. I kept striking the steel,

shick!

but the torch wouldn't light.

shick! shick!

It just wasn't working. Over and over,

shick... shick... shick!

But trying so hard, still all I got was sparks. So I struck harder and harder and why couldn't I do it? Why couldn't I just get one thing to work? It was so hot in that corner with the gloves and the sparks and finally after one last angry,

SHICK!

I broke.

With all the force in both lungs I yelled into my mask like I yelled in my closet at home or out on the street to the drunk guy or inside my head. The sound reverberated in my ears and the mechanical saws and the sliding sandpaper and voices and industrial fans and vacuums all became dull and I just felt and heard my own pumping blood as I tore off the helmet and it broke on the floor and light flooded my sockets so tired and I toppled the partition and stumbled out, knocking over tools as one of my classmates looked up from the sander and the impulse took over and I started running. I shoved past my worried shop teacher stepping out of his office and past Peter sharpening his perfect knife and I tore gloves from my hands and burst out of the doors into the even brighter sunlight stinging my eyes. I ran past my old P.E. teacher and the underclassmen getting drilled carrying each other up the steep hill that led down to the creaky gate. I dodged them like Manila traffic as I careened down in huge bounds that shocked my feet all the way up to the knees with each heavy fall. I sucked up the smell of their sweat and wet cut grass and Axe body spray and it all came back out of my lungs like the gasps of some worthless dragon.

Just a bunch of sparks wishing to be fire.

I ran until my muscles seized and my mouth filled with that dehydrated bile taste and the sweat stung my eyes and my school uniform clung to my body under the welding jacket like saran wrap. I stood there, a hundred wheezing gasps later, on top of Eagle's Nest. It was the highest point for miles. I could see the window to my room in apartment 503 and Peter's house and his balcony where Lenna kissed Dae Park and the school I'd just escaped from and Cadd Theater where she'd promised me the Someday and out into infinity I saw the little squares stretching out and getting thicker and thicker as the city outskirts became downtown. I could see so far and I could have run anywhere out there but nowhere was far enough. I could go for miles and never outrun the stuff in my brain and the lie and the two of them on my eyelids and the infinite suck.

Nowhere was far enough.

So I went home to start the loop again.

—

"Where'd you go?" Callum was dripping sweat through a white undershirt and uniform khaki pants. Due to the distance from his forehead to the ground this was sort of like having a living showerhead standing in front of me. "Jon came and got me and I figured you'd be at Eagle's so I ran up there but you were gone."

He and Jon had come to apartment 503. Apparently there was a search party out for me.

"I didn't want to scare anyone," I said. "I just snapped. Thanks for... Just, thanks. Sorry."

"Dude, you got me out of PreCalc," said Callum. "Freakin' hate that class." He used his discarded uniform polo to wipe sweat from his forehead and asked, "So what happened?"

I looked to Jon. "You didn't tell him?"

He shook his head. Callum said he knew Adilyn was involved, "obviously," but that was all.

"I don't want to go through the whole thing again right now. Maybe at Bible study or something, I don't know." I wanted to just topple flat onto the ground. The running and the whole not having slept thing were part of it, I guess, but I didn't feel sleepy as much as I just wanted to not be awake.

"You're gonna tell us the whole story sometime, Daniel," said Callum. "Dude, you know I'm a dick to you about this stuff because I worry about you right? I actually like you."

Jon was aghast.

"Look, I know I have a freaky mutant giant body but there's a heart in there somewhere."

"And it grew three sizes today," I said. Jon laughed.

"Oh screw you guys, you can go die," Callum said instinctively. Then, after a pause, he added a little more quietly, "Except, like, don't actually kill yourself dude, 'cause I would be frickin' pissed."

"I'm not gonna kill myself," I said.

Jon said, "That's reassuring," honestly.

Then my parents came to the door and Jon and Callum said they would see me later and I said okay.

I had to explain it all again. My mom kept trying to put her hand on me and I kept jerking back. She asked if Adilyn and I had sex. The behind the eyelid silhouette figures kept flashing in front of me. My dad said things like how it was irresponsible to just leave school and how that wasn't a way to deal with problems and that I'd forget about it all with enough time and Adilyn was just young and everyone makes mistakes and all the wrong things as I sat feeling the ever-widening hole in my chest and the raw edges of it stinging and all I could do was sit holding my knees and not making eye contact with either of them and waiting for them to go away.

I wished then that I didn't have parents. I wanted there to be no one left to love me so that I could just be hurt without having to consider how that affected anyone else; without getting a lecture because of the things wrong in my brain that I couldn't explain to anyone.

When they finally did leave, I got off my bed and sank into the floor, spreading out against it with my cheek on the cool surface and staring at a single tiny hole in the almost white wall. I focused on the high pitched noise of the fluorescent light screaming its tiny scream in the dead silence and felt the black mass inside slowly getting bigger and bigger.

The Scientist

"I'm sorry," I said to Adilyn.

"You're sorry?" We sat in an abandoned hallway while the others were off at chapel singing to the God I didn't know if I believed in anymore.

"For swearing at you," I said. "I was upset and I swore."

She gaped. "I would have sworn too, are you joking? I'm sorry. Sorry doesn't even come close to one percent of this, like, tumor in my stomach. I feel like I have this huge tumor right here," she said pointing at her belly. "You should be mad at me. I would be screaming at me right now. Just... where did you go that night? I was so worried about you."

"I went for a walk." I said. "It was so crazy, I just... man. I wanted to die."

Her eyes widened in shivers and she said, "...Daniel..." and put her hand on my arm, face scrunched up with concern. She whispered, "Daniel I'm so sorry."

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "How could you lie to me for so long?"

"Because I didn't want to lose you!" she said. "I didn't know how to tell you the truth. I didn't want to hurt you and look, I did. This is why, because I didn't want you to feel like this and I—"

"NO!" I flared up. "Every day you didn't tell me you hurt me so much more than if you'd told me the day before. Three years... you waited three years. I asked you so many times. I asked you so many times, Adilyn. I gave you so many chances." I stared at the wall. "I didn't know anything could hurt this much."

"I know," she said. "I'm sorry."

"You were my best friend."

"Daniel, I'm sorry."

"I loved you, Adilyn." My voice was almost a whisper now. "I still do."

"I love you too," she said.

I slammed my fist into a wooden crate next to me and the word, "LIAR!" echoed out down the hallway. "Liar. You're lying, stop lying, why are you still lying to me? Three years and all of it was lies, just stop."

"That's not fair!" She moved in front of me so she could look me in my eyes urgently. "Daniel, I wasn't lying!"

"You were with Peter the whole time!"

"It's not Peter!" she said.

"Adilyn, I know it's Peter." That was a lie.

Another longest pause.

She looked like she was about to argue for a moment but then she just hung her head and stared down at the concrete and asked, "You do?" all quiet again.

"Yeah," I said. "I do." And that was the truth. "Does he know?"

"No," she said. "He doesn't know anything about you and me."

"But you're going to tell him," I said firmly.

She nodded. She pressed fingers into her temples. She looked even more tired than I was.

"I hate him," I said after more silence.

"He didn't know any more than you did!" She insisted. "You should hate me! Just please, Daniel, please just hate me. I deserve it, I know I do."

"I don't want to but I can't help it." I examined the wall's faded paint. "He got to spend so much time with you," I said. "He got to kiss you. What you said. The way you feel—"

"It's different with you and me and me and him," she began, voice soft and slow. "I know I lied to you about it being Peter and, yes, I like him but I didn't lie to you about us," she said, moving in front of me again. "That was real," she promised. "On Skype, at the mall, during the play." She looked so sincere. So normal. She looked the same as she used to. She looked like my old Adilyn. "I care about you so much, Daniel." Her eyes were puffy red. "I felt things with you that I never felt with him."

"Then why did you kiss him?" I asked. "Why didn't you and I have what you had with him?"

She said, "Because you weren't there. He was. That was it. You stopped hanging out with us and—"

"I stopped hanging out with you?" I cut her off.

"You did!" she said. "After the play!"

"Yeah but..." Then I went quiet. Maybe she was right about that.

"I wanted—" Her voice caught as she tried to explain. "I—I needed... But Daniel, I wanted those things with you too," she said. "I promise."

"Then why didn't we kiss?"

I felt her hand on my arm again. "Because you never kissed me," she said. "All those times I thought for sure you would kiss me but you never did. I didn't think you wanted to."

"You did other things with him too," I said.

"You don't want to have that kind of guilt. Peter and I shouldn't have done those things. Both of us we know it was too far."

I thought back to a couple of boys hiding from kisses under a slide.

"Daniel." She squeezed my arm and looked into my eyes. "I never lied to you about us." I tried not to focus on how good it felt to feel her touching me. "Please believe me. It was real. It was. I like you so much. You're my best friend."

I sat there and breathed for a few moments. I slid my hand over and put it on top of hers and said, "Okay." We sat through a long silence. I put my arm around her shoulder and she leaned into me and I rested my head in her black cloud of hair and I said, "You are so beautiful."

And I could feel her heave a soft sob under me as she said, "I didn't think you would ever want to see me again."

I put my other arm around, wrapping her up. "You're my person, Adilyn. You're the one I would keep. This sucks. This sucks so so much. But you're not getting rid of me." She laughed and pulled back her head to smile up at me with watery eyes. "I love you," I said.

"I love you too," she told me. She pulled herself closer. "Thank you."

Chapel was ending and we had classes to go to, so after a while, she walked me out of the shadows back into the light of day.

I'm okay, I told myself. Jon's warning echoed in my brain as I walked alone to class and thought, I am okay.

—

Both members of the Daniel Foutz Internal Council of Romance lie pinned heavily beneath the mammoth black paw of a sleeping monster...

The Stallion: Why can't he see? It's so obvious now.

Wallace: It won't let him. It's a terrible thing, isn't it? This twisted breed of love.

Up in Flames

No one else at school knew why I had gone crazy those weeks before.

The first days following the meltdown I had people coming up to me to ask if I was okay. "Yeah," I would say. "I'm fine," I would say. "I'd rather not go into it if that's okay," I would say, opening and closing my hands with each response.

On the days when my brain wasn't so sick I would go and eat lunch with Callum in Jon's office. They didn't ask me questions or mention rumors about Adilyn and Peter dating like everyone had started to. I could sit there and observe them like a movie and forget for a little while how bad the hole inside was. The problem was that distraction could never fill the hole. When lunch ended it was still there sucking away everything. And then there were the other days when the thing in my head got angry and loud and hurt like thoughts with sharp edges cutting up.

On those days I would walk over to the middle school building, past the locked doors of Cadd Theater where I'd tasted the Someday for the first time. I would walk past the banquet hall where we'd had our first date and outside the room with the old musty couch and the ceiling full of tiny holes. I would walk past all of that and down a staircase to the school's loneliest bathroom. I would go into the boys' and shut off the whining fluorescent light and lock the door dark and quiet in the farthest stall. There, carefully, I would remove a pair of earbuds that she had given me on my last birthday and sit and play her music in the dark until my next class.

Then there were the other other days.

Some days the thing in my brain made me want to die.

On those days I couldn't think anything else. On those days I would wrap socks around my knuckles and punch and punch and punch the bathroom wall until I cracked open the skin and I could start to feel the crunching give in my finger bones. It was why I opened and closed my hands when people asked me if I was okay. I could say that I was fine and then remind myself with the jolts that shot up from the bruises that there was this thing wrong with me. It was a way to keep myself sane while repeating the same lie over and over and over...

briiiiiiiiiiiing!

The bells would ring until the last one did. Then I would go back to apartment 503. For a while I would go and fall asleep but I kept having the same nightmare with him and her walking down the sidewalk and me a puddle they splashed under their sneakers, so I stopped doing that. What I did instead was go jogging.

A lot.

I would go for miles until it was dark like it had been that night and I couldn't run away anymore and I would come home and sit naked on the tiles in my shower with the cold water raining down and the stuff chasing me would catch up and I would grab a towel and put it on my knees and scream a muffled scream into it. I'd get out. My mom would ask me if I had a good run and I would say I had and I would lie down and hope that when I fell asleep Adilyn and Peter wouldn't be there that time.

So like, average days in the life of a perfect person.

Low

We sat alone in a quiet screaming room.

"Hey, bud," she said softly.

I took a deep breath. I'd asked her to come so we could talk but now I didn't know what to say. Coming up with the right words had always been my thing, but sitting there in front of her I couldn't compose any sentences to begin to explain or ask or tell anything.

And she was the only one.

She was the only one who could fix the thing in my brain but I couldn't say anything. So I cried. I cried in front of Adilyn. That had never happened before. I invited her there alone and now I was just sitting dumb in the dark sobbing in quiet little gasps. She sat there and put a hand on my shoulder, obviously not sure what she was supposed to do.

Finally I looked up and asked, "What's wrong with me?"

She said, "Nothing." She said, "Nothing is wrong with you." She said, "You're fine."

Fine, she said.

You're fine. Not great. Not as good as Peter. You're fine.

She said, "You're fine," and I kept crying softly and she, tears welling up in her eyes from watching me break down like this got up and whispered, "I'm so sorry I did this to you." And then she went away.

—

I sat on the toilet seat with my legs pulled up to my chest and my head sunk in my knees in the dark and let myself get sucked into the black feeling.

briiiiiiiiiiing

I left.

I didn't notice what had happened until I was at the top of the stairs. I waited for people to go to their classes and then navigated swift and quiet to the elementary library where my mom worked. No one was there so I went to her office and picked up the desk phone to called the extension of the only person I could possibly trust to rescue me from my current predicament.

"Hey, Jon," I said.

"Daniel?"

"Yeah. Are you busy?"

"Nope."

I considered hanging up for a moment before saying, "Could you bring me some pants?"

The line went quiet for just a moment and then I heard the words, "You got it. I'll be up in a second."

Eighteen miles through space.

41,000 status updates.

$250 for Bill.

And sure enough he came through the with a pair of uniform khakis in his hands.

"So you don't have to tell me if you don't want to but—"

"I peed myself," I said. No point in lying to the man you called from two hundred feet away with a pants request. "I was just sitting there in the bathroom in the dark and when I left I realized I had pissed my pants." I sat there. He stood there. I sat with pee soaked pants. He stood in the dark with two pairs of khakis.

Then we both started laughing.

He wouldn't have if I hadn't but I did so he did and then we were both there in the shadows crying from how funny it was because I had been so screwed up that I had peed my pants while sitting on a toilet and no matter what the circumstances or how much it sucked, that was still hilarious.

"There's something wrong with me," I said. "With my brain. Like, there has been for a while now, I think."

"Do you wanna talk to a counselor? I could ask Mrs. Carey." Mrs. Carey was our school's non guidance counselor.

I shook my head. "Adilyn has been getting counseling from Mrs. Carey for like a year," I said. "I can't go and talk to the lady who's just been sympathizing with the other side of the story."

"I could find somebody else," Jon said.

I shook my head again. "It's just a few weeks," I said. "I just have to make it a few weeks. But I have to get out of here."

"It'll get better than this," he said, giving me pants. "And I think at some point you should talk to someone who knows something about the brain stuff." He shrugged, "But for now, the guys and I are around. Like this?" he said, gesturing to where we were at rock bottom. "This is no problem. I'm cool with doing this."

"Thanks. Like, a lot."

"That's what friends do," he said. Then he left me to change. And I wondered if maybe God had to be real for someone to be that kind. I wasn't sure. About anything. But I thanked God for pants anyway. And I thanked God for my friend Jon.

—

For the moment the dog is away...

Wallace: Hurry!

The Stallion: I'm hurrying! Okay let's see, cut some strings here... platonic files?

Wallace: I'm working on Jon. You have any others?

The Stallion: Dum da doo... ah! Yes! Here we go now where could we... ha! We're gonna stabilize this thing! We can break the dependency in weeks!

Wallace: Just work fast. That thing could come back at any second and ruin our progress.

The Stallion: Understood. How's the scar?

Wallace: Deep. It'll be there for a while. But at least it isn't bleeding anymore.

—

Callum and April were chair swiveling in the yearbook room. It was empty besides and the only light was the slats catching dust through the blinds tinted blue from the glass and the dull glow of a couple computer monitors. In the corner the air conditioner hummed,

wuuuuuur wuuuuuur wuuuuuur

and, closing the door, it was like sinking down in a submarine or entering an arctic base or some other nice cool separate place with just a couple of faces safe from the rest of everything.

"Sup, brah?" Callum scaled ever to new heights in his attempts to grate on the people around him with vocabulary.

"Daniel Foutz!" April bubbled. "Oh my gosh, you and I need to have a talk."

"Forget it," said Callum. "Da F bomb is a vault. Believe me, I've tried. He's like Area 51 had a baby with the Illuminati and it was raised by KFC's secret herbs and spices."

"It's not—" I started.

Callum raised a hand the size of home plate up and made a plubububu noise with his lips. "Don't even trip, dawg," he said. "You don't have to tell us anything."

"Sorry," April said, zipping her lips. "Uh, is the reason that you're carrying pants a secret too?"

"D Swizzle probably just iced some fool outside for asking questions and then took his pants," said Callum.

I laughed.

Standing there in that room with those two without any underwear on I was certainly not living my mythical Someday. I wasn't feeling all the perfect wonderful feelings like I did when I was with Adilyn. There was still the hole in my chest. There was still the thing in my brain somewhere. But I wasn't feeling the thing or the hole. I was feeling feelings. Good ones. That hadn't happened in a while.

"How are you?" I asked. It occurred to me that I hadn't asked someone else how they were feeling in a long time.

"Like fifty percent homicidal fifty percent dance," said Callum.

"So the usual?"

"I've got a whole drama with Dae Park," said April.

"What?" I asked. "He's not dating Lenna anymore?"

"Dude, that ended like two years ago," Callum scoffed. "Even I know that."

"Oh good," I said. "They were totally gross. So, I'm obviously out of the loop here but I heard fifty percent dance and relationship drama and that is something we can work with." I rolled over to one of the computers.

"Playin' some Hoof?" Callum rolled next to me.

"Yes I am, Callum. And I'm going to play it loud."

click . . . clackety tackety . . . click

The cheap computer speakers crackled with the wall of sound forced through them, but they shook and struggled and squeezed out every drop until they filled our private submarine sanctuary with the song. Intro guitar chords twanged off the walls and Callum and I stood with invisible microphones to belt out the incomprehensible lyrics to each other.

"MILL-OO-KOO-MAHN! SLEEPS ON THE ROOF IN THE MOOOOON!"

And the three of us spun each other around in desk chairs and Callum picked me up and twirled me around while April busted a gut at us and the word garble chorus filled the space of our own. I danced around the edge of the hole and sang out of lungs beneath my black mass brain and smiled and for the first time in forever, the bad stuff wasn't there. It was just now instead of before. It was that second. People kissed for first times and last times and screamed and punched things that weren't alive and things that were and four babies were born and someone died.

But I didn't.

I danced.

Sure, it wasn't Someday. But it was some day. And that's something anyway.

A Hopeful Transmission

The best thing to happen in my senior year of high school was my quadruple wisdom tooth extraction surgery.

"It will be really easy to reschedule," said my mom. I was just smiling goofily to myself at the dinner table.

"Nope," I said. "This will work."

"Bud, you should go on your senior trip," said my dad. "It's your last chance to say goodbye to all of your friends."

I raised my eyebrows at him over a spoonful of soup.

"You have some friends," he said.

"Yeah. But like, Jon and the guys and I will have one more Bible study and that's pretty much it. I don't want to say goodbye to anyone else," I said. "I just want to slip out the back door."

"We know, Dan but there's an importance to leaving well. You don't want to leave behind all sorts of broken relationships."

"This particular broken relationship isn't one that can get fixed in a weekend on the beach. And I can't go on vacation with the two of them," I said. "It's bad enough having to see them together at school." I'd been trying my hand at telling my parents the truth from time to time.

"So you would rather have surgery then go on a free trip to a hotel resort?"

"Absolutely."

He sighed. "Okay. Okay, I'll tell your class advisors."

"Thank you!" I went over and hugged him. And then as I danced my bowl to the sink I said, "I love you guys!"

—

I laid back there getting four teeth surgically ripped out of my face and tapped my foot to the music in my ears. My own music. Out there somewhere they were all packing up to go on their trip and I wouldn't have to be there with them. Alone I could cope. When I saw Adilyn in person though, I instantly fell back in love with her. I instantly hated Peter again. I instantly felt all the bad thing-in-my-brain stuff. Every time she looked at me I was like a marionette pulled out by the strings to dance and sing and then she would get bored and leave and I would hang there in the dark behind a closed curtain.

On the weekends, though, hanging out with Callum and Jon and the guys, I felt almost normal. If there ever had been a normal. They were my people. They were my best friends. They made me the happiest. But in the back of my mind I knew even on those weekends that if she talked to me on Monday I would probably go home and compose another embarrassing midnight email professing my undying love again or go back to the bathroom stall and punch punch the walls or want to get sucked up or different or dead. Those were realities. They sucked. But I was just a week away from something else off in the future.

A new Someday.

All I had to do was make it to that.

—

"You're giving the speech at graduation," my mother informed me.

I didn't bother to protest at the fact that she had once again agreed to something on my behalf while I was asleep and recovering from serious medical trauma. I saw it as my chance to say goodbye without having to actually talk to anyone one on one. It was actually kind of perfect.

—

"...and when I'm old and grey and all of you are fast-fading memories," I said, up on the Cadd Theater stage one last time. "I will be a product of the ineffable moments of the simple and spectacular collisions I had with all of you."

I resisted the urge to seek out the tanned faces of Adilyn-and-Peter in peripheral space as I spoke out into the blurry crowd from behind the podium.

"And we might all be a little smoother for it. So thank you. I owe the unsure hope of my days to come to the good old days that we now resolve with caps and tears and some wonderful yesterdays." Then I walked off to the last great applause I've ever received.

Those were supposed to be my last words to her.

To all of them, really.

I returned to my place in the bleachers by Callum and Joe and Phil and we got handed our pieces of paper and we threw our hats and stood for flashes of other people's moment saving and I left and it was all cinema magic credits rolling play-the-music resolution.

Then I went to the after party.

The guy driving the car to the party was an old friend of mine named Dustin. Dustin with the pogo stick. In middle school, Peter, Sean, and I had been an asshole to Dustin. We'd made insensitive jokes and ditched him when he'd try to eat with us and the pretty girls and we'd just been awful in general. But this old friend who I'd hurt so much was now giving me a ride to our last hoorah and we reminisced about working as counselors together at camp the summer before and all of the musicals we had been in over the last few years and the cast parties and hours and hours of video games and exploring the jungle behind the condo where he used to live too. These memories were ones that returned when I didn't see Adilyn in my head. They came back like flowers out of the burnt field of the last three years.

—

I found a lawn chair to sit in. One by the fire pit out in the backyard. I sat there and watched them all. Old and new songs mixed over the speakers as people ran around crying and trading stories and final confessions and declarations and all that. It was like, for a moment, I could see all of their individual lines of toppled selves converging with our present versions. We were all there for just a second, paused on our ways to great big whatevers. And it seemed so entirely correct for this thing to end and that we should all go off and become other people.

April cried when I hugged her goodbye.

I didn't.

I told people I would miss them but that wasn't really true. It wasn't because I didn't like April or people. I liked April a lot. I even liked people a little. But I was ready to get in my rocket ship and blast off and start over somewhere else to forget the bad bits. Dustin and I were on our way to his car to slip out early when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

"Hey man," said Peter as I turned around.

"Hey, man," I said, putting my hands over my pockets and looking between his eyes. We stood silent for a while, all that space between us. Finally I said, "It was good knowing you, man."

"You too, man."

We were very manly.

He squished my arm between us in a mangled hug and even that seemed correct and finished and I turned and the car was there and it could have been perfect.

"Daniel?" said Adilyn.

I stopped and turned and tried to keep my feet on the ground as I said, "Yes, Adilyn Chan?" Of course Coldplay's new album was playing through the speakers. Of course she was dressed all nice with hot clothes on her curves and lip gloss and that smell hitting me like a bowling pin. And of course those brown eyes enormous behind glasses and biting her lip and sauntering over leg leg leg in short shorts of course of course of course.

Peter stood a couple of feet away and Dustin stood the same distance in the other direction with his car keys ready to go and I tried to think up the perfect line to go out on.

"Can I see you one more time before you go?" she asked. "On Eagle's Nest? I have something I want to give you."

"Of course not! WHAT ARE YOU NUTS? This is the end! The finale! We're resolving perfectly right now, Adilyn and you can take your one more time and stuff it down Peter's throat next time you kiss him because you're still kissing him and not me so what more could we possibly have to say to each other?"

That's probably what I should have said.

It wasn't though.

Of course.

What I actually said was, "Of course. I'll see you then," dangling from my strings with nose stretched out from self told lies.

We Never Change

On the last night, her driver picked me up outside the Valley Condo.

She and I sat in the backseat. I was hours away from a flight to the other side of the world. I was so close. I was ready.

We got out of the car where the road ended up the hill behind Trust Academy. There, on Eagle's Nest the night before, I had been with Jon and Callum and the guys one last time and we'd set off fireworks and made a bonfire and leapt through it naked; a final baptism of friendship before saying our Goodbye Forevers as we all walked to vastly different futures. It was so perfect. Freeze frame six firebutts leaping through the air above Manila. Play The Pixies.

500 Days of Bummer

Starring

A Bleached Q-Tip

A Sandwich Waster

A Puppet Master

A Super-Tall Asshole

A Pant-Bearing Angel

Music By

Coldplay

Deerhoof

No hearts were broken in the making of this picture.*

But of course Adilyn and I crossed the ashes on the hilltop and went right to the edge where we could dangle our feet over the steep slope down and see the universe and the beautiful city now lit up beneath it. We sat and shared the sky for the last time.

"Look," she said after we'd watched it all for a while. She pointed a finger out at a red blinking dot zipping across the horizon. "Tomorrow that'll be you," she said. "Up in a plane, taking off for Germany."

"California actually," I said. "I won't go to Germany until the end of the summer."

"Right."

The dot blipped away into the fog and the orange haze below the few bright enough stars once again became still. As still as a city can be anyway. As still as the world can be flying around the sun. As still as any second of love death and lightning can be. I guess maybe there is no still. But there's quiet. That's what it was.

It was quiet.

"And you're going to your fancy college," I said smirking and nudging her with my elbow.

She groaned, flopping sideways so her head was on my shoulder. "I know," she moaned. "Don't remind me."

"You did it! I knew you would."

"My mom didn't."

"Did you ever show your mom that song I wrote about her?" I had given Adilyn a gag birthday gift one year of me singing covers of all of her favorite songs with the lyrics altered so that they were about her mother.

"NO," she said laughing. I felt her rise and fall against me with the laughs and felt my own laughs move her in space. "Such a dork," she said.

"That was my best work."

She smiled at me with that original heart tickling smile. "You're ridiculous."

Her glasses were gone tonight. Just her eyes, still brown enormous, catching the light of the city I'd spent my whole life in and was soon about to leave.

"Here," she said, taking the Manila envelope from the Manila ground next to her and handing it to me. Reaching in, I first pulled out a stapled book of papers. I squinted to read it in the dark. "It's a mixtape," she said. "Only I don't have a way to burn CDs and I didn't know if you would even have a CD player in Germany so there's a link on that paper to an online playlist. Then there's like a letter that has an explanation for why each song is in there and why it reminds me about you and me."

"You are extraordinary," I said. "Do you know that?" I handed her a folded over piece of computer paper. "This isn't nearly as awesome as your gift but—"

"Dude, you didn't have to give me anything. You already gave me so much. Are you sure you don't want the Wakey Wakey album back?"

"No way!" I said. "That's yours forever."

"Okay, good because I didn't actually want to give it to you." She grinned wide and shone her phone's light on the drawing I'd made of a boy and a girl lying in a field underneath a tree underneath the stars connected by earphones with music floating up to fill the sky.

"That was such a good night," she said.

"Yeah." I said. "It was."

We went quiet.

"I'm really sorry, Daniel."

I just shook my head and said, "Forget it, Adilyn."

She nodded. "Okay." Then she took my hand in the grass in the dark on top of our world as we watched it end.

A pink earbud appeared in front of my face, removed from her little bag full of smaller bags. We listened to the song we had sung together when I held her under the tree under the stars in the place in that picture a couple lifetimes ago. I put an arm around her as we watched it float away.

"One more thing," she said as the song faded out. She pulled me up onto my feet. "You've gotta be standing for this one." Rummaging in her bag she removed a little black box.

"Are you gonna propose to me?" I asked.

"Oh dude, this is way better than being married to me." She handed me the cardboard container and I pulled off the lid.

I removed the thing from its velvet bed. "No way." I held the silver Zippo up in the light and flicked it open. It made that satisfying,

shick

noise. I flicked my wrist and the lid popped back down with an equally satisfying,

clink

"Here, read the inscription." She held up her phone so I could read the words she'd had embossed at the top.

This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time.

It was my favorite line from Fight Club.

"Ho-lee crap," I said.

"Right?" She grinned. "Pretty good, huh?"

"This is the greatest thing anyone has ever given me." And it really was.

"There's no fluid in it yet," she said. "I didn't know if you can take lighter fluid onto a plane so—"

I wrapped my arms around her and squeezed, lifting her just barely off of her feet and spinning around once before returning her to the ground.

"You're welcome," she said.

"Thank you."

Then we were standing close. We were standing close at the end of it all and her head was tilted back so she could look into my eyes. She reached out, put her tiny hands on my face so soft and said, "Daniel Foutz. I am going to miss you so much." She held me there, just staring as if to make sure I believed her.

I copied her, putting my own hands on her face too small for its features. I echoed, "I'm going to miss you so much."

"Come on, Foutz," she said. "You're gonna have to be a little more original than that."

So I kissed her.

I pulled her face into mine, lowering my head down and turning so our noses wouldn't collide. Our lips met and her arms curled around me and my hands went through her black Shakira hair as I tried to figure out what the hell to do with my tongue in her mouth. But something was working wet and warm and close and my right hand drew a circle around her ear and down her neck and kept going until it rested on the small of her back so I could pull her in closer like we were dancing in the spotlight again. She tasted like that just barely sweet fruit smell. Finally I pulled back my head but she threaded fingers through my hair and pulled me back in quick and gentle and kissed me and kissed me like she was kissing me enough for the last three years.

All of the sudden we had been continued.

We found ourselves some while later swaying in the dark, foreheads together and looking into each other's eyes so close that we became bug people.

"I love you." I breathed the words against her forehead, kissing her there like a final period at the end of a long twisted sentence.

She pulled herself up on toes, arms around my neck and kissed my cheek and her words tickled in my ear saying, "I love you too, Daniel."

We continued to sway. Faces and bodies close. And then something occurred to me and I asked, "Can you do me a favor?"

"What's that?" she asked softly against me.

"When you remember this story," I whispered nervously, "can you try to forget that my boner was pressed against your leg like this?"

She titled her head curiously, smiling. "You have one?"

I am Jack's tiny prick.

"Forget it." I winced. "Never mind. Oh gosh. I'm sorry, I thought you—"

She laughed. I don't know if I was more embarrassed that I'd said something so dumb or that my full on erection squeezed against her thigh hadn't even registered a blip on her penis radar.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry."

"Shh." She put a finger on my lips still wet from her. "Perfect moment," she said.

Then we walked back together, all the while me rambling nervously trying to get her to answer straight if I had been a good kisser or not. She laughed and told me I was fine and we got in the car and she dropped me off outside my house for the last night that it would be. We hugged a final goodbye and I held on and on and on until she said, "Daniel, I have to go."

And I said, "Okay."

And I said, "Goodbye Adilyn."

And she made a little rainbow wafture with both hands and walked away, leaving in her wake the detergent smell of her clothes and the just barely sweet taste of her mouth and also myself, scattered crumbs and fish bones on a finished platter.

That's the story of my first kiss.

Lost!

Night falls on Disneyland.

I stood with my family; complete for the last time for a long time as we watched video clips projected onto jets of water. In a short while my sister would return to British Columbia in Canada and my parents would return to Manila and I, after a summer of work in a warehouse in Ontario, would board a plane bound for Germany. All I could see that night in the colors and music dancing in the cascading water was Adilyn's face up on Eagle's Nest. All I could think about was how much I wished she was standing there with me.

Each night of our vacation I would lie on the hotel carpet and unravel the earbuds she gave me from their case and listen to the playlist she had made. The songs were filled with tales of tragically hopeful romance. The words she wrote about of each of them made me feel sure that the kiss on the last day wasn't just some goodbye, but reassurance about the possibility of a dreamy tomorrow.

I wrote to her every night. Each reply I got she signed off with, 'I love you.' I would sit and read those words over and over, flicking the lighter that I kept always in my pocket open and closed with a,

shick... clink

shick... clink

—

There's a moment right before a light bulb gives out that it shines extra bright, just for a second.

danster237: Just tell me. Please. Will there ever be a Someday?

xTheScientistx: No. No, Daniel there won't. I was never in love with you. I didn't feel the same way about you that you felt about me. I'm sorry if the playlist was misleading. I really do hope you have an amazing time in Germany.

danster237: Okay.

It was my birthday.

Of course.

* Except this guy's. It was pretty much trashed.

—

It was a couple of weeks later. I stood up and paced in circles, grabbing my hair in clumps wanting to scream and cry. The earphones were broken. I dropped my iPad and the auxiliary jack bent against the ground and they would never work again never again never again. I wrote to her and explained what happened and apologized. She told me it was okay. She told me it didn't matter. She told me to please calm down. She told me I was scaring her. She asked me if was hurting myself again.

I told her yes.

I told her about the boxcutter scars on my chest. She told me she was going to talk to someone for me. I told her not to. She told me this:

xTheScientistx: I am so so sorry.

I never heard from Adilyn again.

I did, however, soon receive a message from her counselor. She told me that Adilyn had expressed concern about me. I told her my story and asked her not to tell my parents. So obviously I later received a horrified letter from my parents asking if they should fly over to see me and I said, "Of course not." I said, "I'm fine." They told me they didn't think it would be good for me to go to Germany. The threat of that was what got me to agree to see the therapist.

—

I told him the whole damn story. Right away. I walked in, sat down, and said, "Here's what happened." I wasn't looking to be cracked open slowly so he could find my gooey inside. All I wanted was for him to fix the thing in my brain. That was it.

I dumped everything on the table. The unpredictable mood swings and depression and Adilyn and Peter and Someday; the whole ill fated dalliance.

"I'm interested," he said, "in the times when you say you feel these 'extreme highs.' When you feel that way, do you ever do anything dangerous? Impulsive?"

I scrunched my eyebrows together. "No, that's not the problem, sir," I said. "Those times are awesome. I can do anything. I run for miles and write thousands of words, but then things get so bad so fast and I just want to fix it. Can you fix it?"

"I'm going to show you a video clip," he said, turning a laptop screen to me. This guy was about thirty and didn't wear a sweater vest or wire rimmed glasses or anything.

The video was entitled "I Have a Dog and His Name is Depression." It's about an Australian cartoon man who has this imaginary black version of Clifford who shows up randomly and makes him feel bad by sitting on the string of his kite. The dog "sniffs out" his confidence and scares it away and makes him mean to his friends and family. The man tries to make the dog go away by throwing furniture at it but the dog just gets bigger and bigger. In the end it turns out that the black dog doesn't start to go away until the man goes to a therapist to talk about the black dog.

A big black depression dog?

Stupidest thing I'd ever heard.

My parents were charged three hundred dollars so that I could go to a man and tell him about my problems so he could show me a video about a dog that told me that the answer to my problems was to tell a therapist about my problems. Obviously, if I didn't arrive at that as a solution I WOULDN'T HAVE COME TO SEE YOUR HALF BAKED DOOGIE HOWSER PSYCHO-CROCK ASS!

...

...

sorry.

...

...

(kind of)

So Frasier goes back to asking me about my manias. That's what he called the highs and lows. I didn't know how to explain to him that feeling awesome was not my problem. I tried saying, "Feeling awesome is not my problem. It is, in fact, the opposite of my problem. Wishing I could kill myself is my problem. Feeling awesome is awesome."

He scribbled on a clipboard.

He adjusted his glasses.

He said he felt that, if anything, I might need drugs to prevent me from feeling awesome. I may as well have been telling a pineapple my tragic love story. He advised that I get a blood test (another six hours and $200).

I said, "Fine." Then I stopped and considered something. "You won't tell my parents about any of this, will you?"

"No, Daniel," he said in a big dumb stupid stinky fart breath voice. "Our sessions are completely confidential." It's cute that he thought we were going to have another session.

"But can you stop me?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I've heard before that if one of you guys hears something from a patient that gives you a strong reason to believe that they might hurt themselves then you're allowed to contact someone."

"Well, if I felt you were a danger to yourself or to others then, yes, I would. Do you think you're a threat to yourself or to others?"

I'm kind of thinking of punching you right now, does that count?

"No, sir," I said.

"Neither do I. But I am a little apprehensive about this trip you're taking to Germany. When you're there you won't have access to therapy sessions or the support of your family."

My jaw went stiff. "You don't think I should go to Germany?" I asked.

"I think we should wait and see the results from the blood test and then talk about it."

"I'm going to Germany."

"But—"

"I have a plane ticket," I said. "My tuition is paid."

"Daniel... if not going to Germany meant that you could live a healthier life, wouldn't you want to stay? I'm sure your school would be able to reimburse you for some of your—"

"Can you stop me?" I asked again.

"I still don't understand."

"If I got on a plane to Germany tomorrow, would you contact my parents or anyone else?"

"No, Daniel," he said. "I wouldn't."

"Okay. That's all I wanted to know."

"I'm just concerned about these extreme fluctuations in your emotions, Daniel."

"What's wrong with me?"

"It would be irresponsible of me to say at this point."

That's what the pineapple would've said.

"Thanks, doc." I smiled a perfect actor smile. "This was super helpful." Then I left, got a blood test, and was denied drugs.

So basically, therapy was a bust.

—

"What did he say, Daniel?" My mom was in my iPad.

"We had a great chat. I feel a lot better now."

"Did he think you were okay to go to Germany?"

"Oh yeah," I said. "Totally fine. He said it'll be good for me to get away and be in a new environment."

"Oh, honey that's great!" said my mom.

So yeah, it was a lie.

But it was the lie that got me to Germany.

Bigger Stronger

Meanwhile on shutter island...

Living in a head is not so much being in a place as it is feeling like a place. Daniel's head felt like shit. Stinky dog shit with musky black hair and torn shag carpet and slobber on your clothes and caked blood and a scattered mess of papers and folders and two quivering mental projections standing over a trashcan fire torching bits and pieces of the past to stay warm. It was, after all, very cold now that the walls had fractured.

They knew the dog was somewhere out in the shadows. Wallace and The Stallion had resigned to believing that he always would be. After all, the last time they thought it had gone, it wound up mauling them both. Wallace had a peg leg. The Stallion had to wear an eyepatch. This was ironic considering that, as a mental projection, he was actually more equipped to see things coming then he had been when he'd made the initial decisions that had led to this Cormac McCarthian apocalypse.

"We were huddled close, you remember?" The Stallion asked over the fire. "Formed up and alert like the Wet Sneaker Fallout. That thing came close to you or me and either of us would pound and holler and scream and sometimes the dog would go away."

"Jason?" said Wallace wearily.

"But sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that dog, he looked right into me. Right into my eyes. You know the thing about a dog, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye."

"Do you know that I know that you're just doing the monologue from Jaws or..."

"Is that what that is?" He asked, unperturbed. "Found it somewhere in all those scattered memories. Seemed like a man who knew something like what we seen."

"You're not going to keep doing that stupid gravelly voice are you?"

"I just might."

"The worst is over, Jason."

"Call me The Captain."

"The worst is over, Jason."

"Even if you're right, how do we ever pick up from all these broken pieces? We loved, we lost. We're bombed out, we're spent, we're dead in the water, we're gonna need a bigger boat—"

"Stop."

"We're a Romantic Council living in a broken heart. What's the use?"

"The use? We pick up the pieces. We get out the crazy glue. We fix this and we move on. What happened to you?"

"Love did, Wallace. Didn't it happen to you too?"

"...Well we can agree on one thing then."

"What's that?"

"Love."

"What about it?"

"We're not falling into it again. The drop is far and the ground is hard and hearts are way too fragile."

"Agreed. No more falling in love."

"Maybe we'll let him get a cat one day."

"An ugly cat."

"Hideous."

"Yeah. That could be alright."

"But no girls."

"Heavens no."

"Certainly no more Adilyn."

"Don't say her name. We don't even have walls anymore and it's still echoing around in here."

The Escape

At the bottom of Germany there is a little town called Friedrichshafen.

A city, I guess technically, but a city like a tomato is a fruit or a crocodile is a dinosaur. It's a tidy assortment of wise old productions of wood and stone that rise dramatically to peaked roofs with baked shingles skiing down at angles like the Swiss Alps, which on a fogless day materialize across the lake. Rough-sloping cobbled streets flow around and between the weathered churches and shiny museums. They give pedestrians and bicyclists space to move without having to mingle with noisy cars and busy trucks on the outer roads. It's a place with bakeries, cafés, and confectionaries that come with deep breaths of the next greatest whatever you've ever smelled. It's a place of old trees and bronze statues of faded heroes and some curious piece of art greeting you around every corner. It's a postcard with a pulse.

Picturesque.

You'd never consider to look at it that it had been left little more than a smoking crater after World War II. The zeppelin museum and factories no longer bring to mind memories of holocaust workers or nazi flags. It used to be a resort town for architects of cruelty.

But it isn't anymore.

I leaned against the railing that kept me from tumbling the sixty feet down into Lake Bodensee (or in English, Lake Constance). Crowding the platform of the observation tower at the water's edge were some dozen beautiful young ladies with whom I knew, smugly, I would never fall in love. They were my new classmates. Some of them anyway.

I'd stepped off the plane the night before and they had generously agreed to let me crash their party at the Friedrichshafen youth hostel since I hadn't booked a place to stay for the night. So I was temporarily a part of their group, but only out of mutual politeness. We were awkwardly whittling away time, exploring our new world and waiting for the van to come by to drive us the few miles down the coast to our new home:

Constance Haus Bible School — A place to forget your ex-girlfriend.

That last bit wasn't in the brochure but it had sold me nonetheless.

The view of Lake Bodensee and the ferries and swans and the dim foggy edge of Switzerland and the young ladies and the picture book German town around me were all breathtaking. But I found myself instead fascinated by the tiny love stories hanging in pairs all around me. The chain link barrier I had been leaning against was adorned with hundreds of padlocks. Each lock had a name and each name was locked to another name. It was a romantic tradition in Friedrichshafen, I discovered, to climb up the observation tower, lock your name to your lover's and then together toss the key out into the water.

I read through the couples locked together forever at the bottom of Germany: Marcelle and Johan, Cibelle and Gustaff, Markus and Simone... I wondered how many of them were still together. I imagined some determined ex girlfriend swimming out into the water to fish through the keys at the murky bottom so she could chuck her cheating partner's lock out to the depths. I peered over the edge to the place where hundreds of keys must have been slowly rusting on the lake's bed. I wondered if you would die from a jump at that height.

"Want to get coffee with us?" One of my new classmates woke me from my musing to realize that the group was now descending the stairs.

"Yup," I said. "I'm coming." I made a wafture that communicated that I would follow in a moment. Her head disappeared down the steps and I fished the silver rectangle from my pocket. Holding it out over the watery grave of promised forevers I made it go,

shick... clink

shick... clink

I lingered there for a moment before sliding the object back into my pocket and hurrying down to rejoin the group.

The Island of the Day Before

"Make yourself at home."

My suitcase guts were spilled out on a top bunk bed that would never be nicely made like that again. I squinted eyes at the reclining sun down the short corridor of my four man dorm room and then turned to see the reflection of a guy whose red hair would not sit properly and whose shirt was just a little too short over jeans exposing mismatching socks that disappeared into a tragic pair of once white sneakers. The narrow valley of beds and closets lining the room's walls ended at a sliding glass window that looked out at the apple orchard that Constance Haus was built on.

I didn't know what to do with myself. I had completed my list of tasks which looked like this:

1. Bring bag to room.

When I'd shown up they told me to, "Get to know everyone!" which to me was like, "Prove to everyone that you don't suck!" And that would have been an anxiety inducing challenge even on a day that had not begun by being politely ignored by a dozen beautiful women.

My immediate thought was to find some equivalent of a poolside chair to sit in to film everything in my brain. But there were no poolside chairs. Everywhere I could have gone was filled with faces all giddy and talking and they would want to ask me questions and I would say something stupid and everyone would hate me before I even made it to dinner. So I decided to go for a walk.

I made it to the landing of stairs outside my hallway without bumping into anyone before accidentally locking eyes with a chipper young man down the hallway who immediately grinned at me with a half melon sized smile.

"Hiya!" Tall, dark hair, bright blue eyes, highly American. I recognized him from the Constance Haus web page as one of the students who had arrived early to help prepare things for the school year. So like, he was talking to me because it was his job to talk to me. I felt like the kid who has to be paired up with the teacher on the field trip.

"Hey!" I said trying to match his enthusiasm while masking the abject terror behind my too-wide eyes.

"How are you, my friend?" His hand was shaking my hand vigorously before I could even extend it all the way out to him. "My name's Chris," he said. "What's yours?"

I am Jack's sprinting pulse.

"Daniel," I said. And then I came to a realization. "Daniel Foutz." It was the first time I'd said that to someone who didn't know my dad. My last name bounced right off of Chris' smiling eyes and it began to dawn on me that, here, I could be whoever I said I was.

When he invited me to play volleyball outside I, therefore, did not say, "I actually detest sports because in school I used to throw up every day in P.E. class."

I instead said, "Sure!" and tried to remember if this was the one with rackets or the one that professional female players are for some reason required to wear bikinis to participate in.

There was a perplexing shortage of both rackets and bikinis. My ignorance proved irrelevant, however. Volleyball, as it turns out, is a sport in which you don't have to do anything at all if you don't want to. I just stood there in the sand pit and held my hands out in front of me, looking like I was ready to punch or shove or bonk or whatever you do to the ball should the need arise. When it came near me and I stepped out of the way I was commended for sacrificially allowing someone else to set up the spike.

It was my kind of sport.

The volleyball experience improved only when so many people showed up that not all of us could stand in the pit at once and I was able to volunteer to sit out on the sidelines. They asked me if I was sure and I said that this was, indeed, cool. Whenever a new person showed up they would introduce themselves by name and I would, in an attempt to commit it to memory, repeat it silently to myself. Twenty students later I had logged the name Chris at the top of an internal checklist of names that contained another one hundred and ten blank spaces.

It was a start.

—

The food served to us at supper was almost good enough to make me forget how uncomfortable I was to be sitting at a table of strangers. Almost. I was introduced to three different Joshes who sat around the wooden circle with me. At first I thought that it must have been some sort of hazing prank but I later discovered that there were no fewer than sixty young men named Josh enrolled in Constance Haus.

Okay so there were like five, but still.

The benefit of the abundance of Joshes was that over the next few weeks as I failed to recall names of people I had previously met I just said, "Hey Josh!" and was right most of the time. Chances of Josh each day were one hundred percent with a relatively high probability of Sarah.

These were the thoughts that ran through my brain as I nodded and grunted at my table of sociable Joshes who discussed the sports of football and hockey and something about protecting America's borders.

Maybe I'll just be friends with Jesus.

—

One by one I listened to the introductions, forgetting the names instantly. We were all assembled in the lecture theater, cafeteria, church, auditorium. The cafechurchetorium. It was the heart of our little school building/commune.

Our student coordinator, a five o'clock shadow haired American man named Gabriel, stood at the front, beaming at us with a smile that was all teeth. He was an unironically genuine guy. I'd gotten that impression from all of the staff that I'd met by that point. Like they were all really there because they believed in the place and what they were doing. After a little welcome to Bible School song and dance there was a run through of some of the basic rules which were:

Don't: Drink, smoke, have sex, watch movies, miss lectures, shirk out on your assigned job.

and

Do: Be inside the building by 10 p.m., in your room and quiet by 11, make friends, live in the real world, make it your greatest end to find truth and know God.

To me the rules were simple, fair, and wonderfully romantic. It was this idea of someone searching out in the wilderness or head shaven in a monastery, leaving the world behind to find answers to an overwhelming question. I felt almost noble, sitting in my chair by the pillar in the third to last row as the get to know you trail snaked towards me. But anxiety betrayed me as I stared at my dilapidated sneakers and turned an empty lighter around in my pocket trying to decide how to define myself to this hall of strangers.

"Hi my name is Max," said Max. Apparently. "I'm from Minnesota and I spent this last summer working at my local YMCA?" His inflection made the statement a question. Like, if you told him that his name was Gary and he had not in fact worked at the YMCA, you might be able to convince him. He was a thin guy with short and curly brown hair, thick smudged glasses, and a sort of warm, dorky smile that spanned the entirety of his face. He looked like the kind of person you would want to babysit your kids. "My favorite animal," he said, answering the last question posed to us, "is the timber wolf." This was the most assured of his answers. Like his admiration of timber wolves was more concrete a fact than his name being Max.

As the introductions continued, I was surprised by how many of the new faces claimed to be from Manitoba. I wouldn't have thought that there even were that many people living in the middle of Canada. In my head all of them grew up in igloos.

"Hey, what's up, I'm Jackson from Brandon, Manitoba." There was a smattering of whispered smart remarks which Jackson addressed quickly by saying, "Yup, there's lots of drugs there." Must have been a Manitoba thing. "Uh, I worked at a ear piercing place at a mall in Winnipeg this summer." He had wooden hoop gauges like bullet holes in his earlobes and wore a grey beanie that covered most of his wave of dirty blonde hair. "My favorite animals are cats," he said. "Because cats don't care what you think they just do their thing like, 'Yo human feed me' and I think you have to respect a species that has successfully enslaved the human race like that." I laughed with the crowd as he took a seat.

My turn came and I summoned a stage face. "Hi, I'm Daniel Foutz," I said. "I'm from..." I could never do this next part without dumping my life story on people. "My mom is from Ontario, Canada," I said. "My dad is from Washington State. Sort of. But I've never lived in America because my parents work as missionaries, so I grew up in the Philippines my whole life. I spent the last month and a half working in a warehouse in Toronto," I continued. "I was assembling shelves for high end clothing companies so that women with no concept of money have a place to buy their purses from." This got a laugh, which eased the knot in my stomach a little bit. I began to sit but then remembered the final question and shot back up to add, "and my favorite animal is the penguin."

Unintentionally I began to tune out after the next few Joshes and Sarahs introduced themselves. It started to dawn on me that this was my world now. That the place I had once called home never would be again and the people around me would become my friends. Maybe even my family. I mean, we would be stuck here together in a little box for the next six months. My life was about to be more different than it had ever been.

"...and I'm from Hoffnung, Manitoba."

She was in the row behind me so I just turned to where I could see her blurry outline peripherally somewhere off to the left. Something she'd said had snapped me out of introspection.

"My favorite animals are sheep," she put in before sitting down.

I turned to the Josh sitting next to me and whispered, "Hey, what did she say her name was? I missed it."

"Huh?" He turned to notice me for the first time. "Oh. Erm, I think she said it was Aidlyn."

The Wilderness of Manitoba

We were all in the cloud as it rained outside.

The Constance Haus wifi room was small and lined around the walls with low couches. It doubled as the school's bookstore and merchandise vendor. The entryway was neatly cluttered with paperbacks and pins and polyester shirts. Inside, decorating the cushions, were however many of us students all,

tap tap

on screens and keyboards and,

click click

with the best intentions of mice and menu buttons. The people in the room did all sorts of internet things but mostly they lied. They didn't mean to, but they could hardly help it. Let's be honest, that's totally what social media is designed for. Helping people lie to each other. It's easy online to just cut out all the ugly bits and present the best version of yourself connected to lots of beautiful versions of friends that you don't see beyond internet profiles. I swore after Adilyn finally told me the truth; the real truth, that I would never have a relationship that was dependent on text boxes again. So I deleted myself from Facebook to try and force myself to be a real person instead of one that I could write and compose. But I still went,

tap tap click

in that wifi room because I had to send my parents an e-mail. The e-mail went like this:

Dear mom and dad. Still alive and Germany is great. Love you!

—Daniel

I sent it and I closed my laptop screen, prepped to leave before the hungry portal of the internet could suck me back in. But over the,

tap tap click click

chorus, as I moved to get up from the warm place by the sun shining window, I heard a voice.

"Would anyone be offended if I played some music?" She spoke with this smooth modulated quality like a radio DJ. I knew who was speaking instantly, even though I still didn't know what she looked like. Even scanning my eyes to the sound I didn't discover much except the back of a rusty blonde head sitting in a chair facing the opposite wall. Well actually, that isn't true. What I discovered was a rusty blonde head angled not down to,

tap tap click

on her half open laptop but turned up to the faces sitting around her. She wasn't off in the e-world. She was present.

"Can you put on some Coldplay?" Someone from the background requested.

"Let me rephrase," said the girl. "Would anyone mind if I played some good music?"

The background voice chuckled, unoffended.

"What's that?" She asked of no one in particular. "You want me to choose? Well okay, if you insist." Some folksy guitar music wafted from laptop speakers.

"What is this?" asked another background voice.

"You mean you haven't heard of The Wilderness of Manitoba? They're only the greatest indie folk band in the entire Southern Manitoba area." She drizzled the kind of polarizing sarcasm that grates on you unless you find it hilarious. "Or like, top five for sure."

I laughed, missing the next background voice question posed to her to which she responded, "I actually only listen to Canadian bands? As a rule. I'm embarrassed that I forgot my bandana but trust me, the revolution is here and I am its leader."

"So you're a hispter?" prompted another voice.

"What do you mean by that?" asked Aidlyn, that being the name of the girl to whom I knew the voice belonged to. The background person elaborated. "Ah, interesting," said Aidlyn. "Is that how you would classify yourself? ... No? Well who would you say you are then? ... Aaah, I see, interesting. Are you comfortable? Good. Tell me about your childhood."

The background voice laughed at her therapist song and dance but then, actually, slowly at first, she put down her phone and proceeded to talk. She told stories about her early life and her dreams and Aidlyn asked questions and pulled out bits and pieces of information with this astonishing acuity and soon the two were really talking. Talking like typically you would only talk to a close friend even though these two had just met and could be heard by everyone. When the background voice had been more or less led to a personal epiphany, another backgrounder looked up from a laptop screen and joined in the conversation. Gradually this new Aidlyn lifted the eyes of the dozen or so around her and instead of,

tap tap click click,

they spoke with words. Aidlyn, it seemed, was an engine of conversation. She wasn't a talker like someone who dominates with endless reams of words and self obsession. She was an instigator. She was a fire poker grabbing fresh human logs for the discussion fire with a look and a smile and a sarcastic remark. She kept the intercourse going but was then always content to sit back and listen. When she did talk, the people around her hung on her words, seeing, as I did as I watched the back of her head, that she had this spark of something extra.

After a while the music emanating from Aidlyn's computer speakers was replaced by the low key indie stylings of a different band that she introduced as Athlete. Some background voice asked if they were Canadian too and she replied simply, "Rules are made to be broken."

A background voice said, "I see you still have your nose ring in. Staff hasn't made you take it out yet?"

Aidlyn said, "Shhh. It's the source of my superpowers."

She was funny in that way that I think many girls don't realize they're allowed to be funny. And she was sure. About what I didn't know, but obviously, whatever it was, she knew, and I and everyone around could see that and we wanted to know too. I saw her as an exclamation point in a room filled with question marks. I wanted badly for her to meet me at the end of a sentence so I could say something definite like she did with effortless humor.

It was during a discussion amongst her group about the poor gender stereotyping of Disney princesses that it happened.

A background voice said, "...yeah and Pocahontas is pretty racist towards Indians at times."

"Native Americans," Aidlyn corrected.

"Uh—"

That's all I said.

Said is an exaggeration, really, I just released a syllable in her general direction before stopping myself. That was all it took.

The rusty blonde head turned around and she looked over the back of her chair at me. Instinct told me to look right back at my computer screen and continue pretending as if I was reading. Social decency urged me to issue some sort of greeting. I wanted to laugh or smile or wave or do something human at least if not natural. But I didn't.

I just got lost.

Her eyes were not enormous behind her left lens smudged brown glasses. They were sky domes with tiny bright flashes in them like stars out in resolute blue space. Those eyes had answers to questions you didn't even realize you had. Answers secreted away somewhere you just might be able to see if you looked hard enough.

Aidlyn's right cheek, and only her right cheek, was decorated as if the freckles that might have been spread about her face at some point had vagabonded around the smooth hills and valleys of gentle skin and finally stopped at that right cheek with its view of the gold ring in her nose. Her lips were sealed together and she looked at me—looked into me, really, with an intensity, not cold or angry just... sure. She looked sure at me and I stood to move over to her and she lifted her chin ever so slightly as if to say, "Yes that's correct."

I set my laptop aside and walked over to her and her circle of background voices who were all faceless shapes that surrounded her slow turning stare, still locked on me like a Kubrickian panning shot. I sat on a foot stool, leaving some space between us in fear that if I came too close I would fall in and be lost forever. When I sat she finally smiled and released my eyes and raised a hand in front of her. She moved her hand slowly in a full circle.

"Hello there," Aidlyn said to me. As with most everything she said, it was as if she was doing an almost perfect job at not laughing at some joke that only she knew but you wanted to.

I mimicked her odd circle wave and said the word, "Hello." Doing so, I watched her follow my wave and then saw her eyes crinkle slightly at the edges. She folded her hands in her lap with fingers interlocked and suddenly I had what seemed to be the most complete and undivided attention that I had ever received.

"...the term Native American," I began, to my own surprise, "was actually suggested by the American government. But in the seventies there was a meeting in Geneva of the elders from the major indigenous tribes across the U.S. where they unanimously voted that they preferred to be called American Indians." Suddenly, under Aidlyn's spotlight, I understood why the background voice from before had so quickly released life secrets to her. "But despite that, Native American is still considered politically correct because the U.S. government said so. So like, saying Native American is actually kind of an F you to American Indians." I shrugged. "But if you say American Indian then you sound racist to white people, so you can't really win."

She tilted her head to the side and said, "That's fascinating." The way she said it and the way she sat and listened and looked at me was all so meticulous. I felt like I was being interviewed. It was bizarre and unnerving.

I liked it so so much.

"Also, Pocahontas was actually about eleven years old when she first met John Smith," I added. "Which makes the whole Disney story pretty messed up."

When she smiled at me then the intensity of her was relieved and I felt as she looked in my eyes that she saw the fundamental piece of myself that I wanted so desperately to be understood but which everyone else seemed to mispronounce entirely. She got it. Somehow. She saw and her smile let me know that she understood, even if nobody else did. It was impossible. Everything about her was impossible. But there she was. Just existing. All of her right down to the head-spinning fact of her name seeming to say, "Not impossible. Just highly improbable."

"I'm glad they got the talking grandma tree historically accurate though," she said. "Hashteg waytogo, Disney." She did a little cross hatch motion with her fingers as she said the word in her Canadian accent.

"And the friendship between that rascally pug and the raccoon," I added.

"Well, of course."

"I'm Daniel," I said, unweaving the fingers in my lap and extending a hand to her. "Foutz."

"I know," she said, leaving my hand in space and giving instead a little two finger flick of the wrist gesture. "Nice to meet you, Daniel. My name is Aidlyn." Then she added, "Penner. Not that there are a lot of Aidlyns in the world to get confused with."

—

We join a dumbfounded Wallace and The Stallion.

Wallace: I can't...

The Stallion: Right?

Wallace: But she's...

The Stallion: I know!

Wallace: But the cat.

The Stallion: Skin the cat, Wallace. She's the one.

Wallace: You're kidding me.

The Stallion: Were you not in the same brain I was in? He's got it bad, Wallace! He's going to fall in love with her!

Wallace: He met her two hours ago and now he's in love?

The Stallion: I didn't say that. I said he's going to be in love.

Wallace: How can you possibly know that?

The Stallion: The same way that you know that.

Wallace: ...this is what happened last time.

The Stallion: I know.

Wallace: How did that turn out again? Maybe open your eye a little and I'll stand lopsided here and we'll work it out together.

The Stallion: This one's different.

Wallace: What makes this any different?

The Stallion: Because she's... well because she's her.

Wallace: Her?

The Stallion: Aidlyn.

Wallace: The girl we just met.

The Stallion: Yeah.

Wallace: She's from Manitoba.

The Stallion: I know.

Wallace: She'll probably go back to Manitoba at the end of all of this.

The Stallion: I know.

Wallace: And she'll walk away with all the crumbled bits left of Daniel's heart stuck to the bottoms of her sneakers and we'll be even colder and the dog will be bigger and angrier and I'll lose my good leg.

The Stallion: You're not using it much.

Wallace: How could you endure all that misery and still want to dive straight back?

The Stallion: Because I'm a romantic. That's what we do.

Wallace: You're an idiot.

The Stallion: Probably.

Wallace: We're both idiots.

The Stallion: Oh?

Wallace: Because God help us all... I want it too.

The Stallion: Well good. It's better that way. Because whether you want it or not we're going to fall in love with Aidlyn Penner. There's totally no helping that.

—

"If someone here tried to hit on me, I would stop talking to them," said Aidlyn. We were sitting on the swings out near the volleyball court. It was nighttime, just a while before lockup.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Yup."

"Um... so why's that?" I asked.

"Because I didn't come to Bible school to find a—ew—husband, or a boyfriend, or love," she said. "I'm not interested. I think it's better to just say thanks but no thanks."

"Sure, but you couldn't be friends?" I tried not to sound crushed. In the dark I felt like she couldn't read my face like she'd seemed to do earlier.

"Not after I knew he was attracted to me," she said. "After that everything is awkward and terrible. All because he couldn't just be friends without confessing his undying love for me."

"Has this happened to you before?"

She looked at me severely, though a little diminished in the dark. "You have no idea," she said. "I've been proposed to twice."

"Oh," I said. "Wow."

"Yeah."

"What did you say to them?"

"I said 'No are you crazy? Of course I'm not going to marry you Nathan, I'm sixteen.'"

"Were they, um, were they both named Nathan?"

"That would have been an unlikely coincidence."

"No kidding. So I guess they must have gotten the message then."

"You'd be surprised."

"I'm sure I would," I said. "I can't say I've ever been proposed to."

"It's awful," she said. She opened her mouth to say something else but just trailed off and added, "Yup," and nodded.

"You're kind of intense, huh?"

"Intentional," she said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Don't be. Intentional. It's why I didn't shake your hand when you introduced yourself. People don't realize what they communicate through touch."

"That's... true," I said. I thought of April's finger on my arm and the kiss with Adilyn. Touching, really, was just another way to lie to people. It was easy. Like Facebook. You don't mean to, you just do. "So you never touch people?"

"Not... intentionally." She seemed to disappear into a memory for a moment. "Yeah." She looked at me suddenly and said, "I used to be a very different person." She said it like she was realizing it for herself for the first time. "Yup."

"Different how?" I asked, ignoring the peculiarity of this sudden confession.

"I was very good at manipulating people," she said. "Especially boys. I would act really flirty and touchy and stupid and I got what I wanted and I was popular and I had a lot of friends."

"Sounds terrible." My hand instinctively fished into my pocket for the lighter.

"It was," she said, ignoring my sarcasm. "It was awful. I was awful to people. And my friends were awful. We did awful things to each other and it was like it didn't even matter."

"So what changed?" The lighter turned around slowly in my fingers.

"I realized that it needed to matter," said Aidlyn. She said the next part slowly, like her saying it was projecting each word up in the sky. "Because bad things happen when you don't particularly care how you are treated." She stared at the moon, swinging softly back and forward.

"What'd you do then?" I asked.

"I dumped my boyfriend," she said. "On his birthday. Don't worry, he completely deserved it. After that I stopped being 'friends' with most of my 'friends.' And I decided to be intentional. The end."

We sat and swung, tanning in the pale blue of the old battered lantern for a bit.

"I, uh," I said. "I read this book."

"Oh," she said. "Well, congratulations."

"Yeah, thanks." I paused to breathe a laugh and then continued, "I read this book."

"I'm sorry, I don't think I caught that. You said you read something?"

"Snarky," I accused.

She nodded. "It's an ongoing battle."

"It's about this kid with autism," I said. I paused for a moment waiting for her to interject again but she just sat watching me. "...Part of his autism," I finally continued, feeling under her microscope like someone tipping his hand in poker, "is that he can't, y'know, be touched. Because it freaks him out. He won't even let his dad hug him or anything. So the dad comes up with this thing where he puts out his hand and spreads his fingers apart and the kid touches his fingers to his dad's. It's like their code for saying, 'I like you.'"

"Hmm," hmm'd Aidlyn. "I'm gonna go back inside now," she said.

"Oh. Okay I'll come with you."

"If you want."

On the cobble driveway, just before the double doors of the main entrance, there was a globe painted on the ground with a cross in the middle of it. We passed over that and I stepped ahead to get the door, but before opening it I stopped and looked at her in the refracted light.

"It was a pleasure talking to you, Aidlyn," I said. Then I reached my hand out in front of me and spread my fingers apart.

"And you as well." She slipped past without touching me and disappeared into the building.

—

Wallace: What a moron.

The Stallion: Total moron.

Morning Sun

Call it a first sunshine hour.

I would say we were made to wake up at some ungodly hour, but that wouldn't be theologically accurate. I mean, we were in Bible school after all.

They had us wake up at some soul-sucking hell of a first sunshine hour.

All of us in the guys' hallway woke up at the same time on account of the Constance Haus' alarm clock, which, for the first month of school, was named Chris. Chris woke up at some ungodly hour before the rest of us to lug the heavy speakers from the cafechurchetorium to the hallway. He would then crank them up to eleven and ghetto blast some truly heinous pop music loud enough to wake the dead and then drive them all swiftly to violent suicides.

With the rest of the class organism, I stepped step outside my room in boxer shorts.

"Good morning, Daniel!"

"Uuuugh," I uuuughed. My eyes weren't even open yet. "Yeah. Morning, Chris," I mumbled to him. My words drowned out by the Spice Girls. Chris did the electric slide over to block my path to the bathroom and I sniggered, shaking my head and pushing him out of the way.

All around me others were crawling out of bed too. They weren't all Joshes anymore. I watched lanky Michael, who always beat me in chess, pull on his thick lens glasses and wave to me vaguely from a few doors down. Hippie-Jesus Tanner slapped my butt as he coasted on by with his standard shorts over tights and some surfer t-shirt billowing open under his explosive mess of curls. One of my roommates, Tyler, gave me a nod as he slipped by with a hanger of slacks and a dress shirt to go and press downstairs, probably prepping for a later Skype date with his long distance girlfriend. Maxwell, from Minnesota, lover of wolves, was semi-reluctantly dancing with Chris. Jackson with the (now removed) bullet hole earlobe gauges stepped outside to groan and flip the screaming amp the bird before shutting himself back in his room.

Initially upon traveling to Germany I had harbored a silent trepidation that I would be constantly walking around thinking, all of these people used to be Nazis. This is an unjust prejudice that I personally theorize the nation of Germany chose to rectify by cultivating the best breakfast on the planet. You wake up in Germany, you get a plate of food, and as soon as you have the first bite in your mouth, you realize that the people who produced what you are masticating could not possibly be the sinister Bond villains you had imagined. Constance Haus breakfast was a buffet of pretzel bread, rich buns, cheese, yogurt, bananas, eggs, and cereal. Every morning was more delicious food than you could possibly eat. And that was just the weekday menu. On Saturdays, along with getting to sleep in however long we wanted, we got brunch. Berry filled donuts, sugarsnowed crepes, meaty German sausage, croissants with chocolate spread, and fresh apples picked fresh from the trees outside. All of that and a couple tankards of really awful coffee. Even that was awesome. The coffee was the kind of awful that unites a people, like manna for the Israelites or Twinkies for America. I drank that lousy coffee each morning until I could feel its warm bitterness pumping through my blood and then, and only then, could I head into the kitchen to join my breakfast dishes crew.

After chores came the morning lecture block, which was split into two hour and a half segments with a break for more awful coffee in between. After the second block there was lunch and potentially more chores, depending on what your assigned job was, but often you could count on having some free hours before dinner and then subsequently a few hours of evening lectures. I spent a lot of those afternoons exploring our town, Fishbach, or walking along the beach, or playing board games and eating brain meltingly good German chocolate in The Haus' student run café, The Honeycomb.

At night, before the building got locked up, you could go out and explore the town in the dark or stare at the moon over the Alps. The other option, depending on which gender had the room that night, was to go to the sauna. The Haus sauna was a place to go and sit naked and sweat in a wooden box with other dudes (girls did their own thing on their nights but I was obviously privy to none of that and so can't speak to the experience). It was Europe. Clothes got left on the shelf by the door and as many as twenty shiny bare bodies would pack into the steam chamber like a pot of dumplings. That's how to make friends fast: Cheek to cheek.

A session in the sauna involved seven to fifteen minutes in the chamber followed quickly by a freezing cold shower piped directly from the Bodensee. After that, you took a long, relaxing lie down on one of the lawn chairs set up on the dark tile floor as Creedence Clearwater Revival played from someone's iPod. After a couple cycles of that, your skin was soft as a slice of Café Hoepker buttercream cake. You would drift asleep before your head even touched your pillow.

The average day at Constance Haus Bible School was a good one. Wednesdays were, however, almost invariably the best. On Wednesdays, we met with our Koinonia groups. Koinonia is a transliterated Greek word which means, "intimate community." We usually called it K group. My group of twelve met at an apartment owned by a young American couple who worked with the local German youth, though they were also pretty heavily involved with The Haus. Their names were Paul and Sheila. They were the kind of people that made you smile to look at. Like, just standing there they made a compelling argument for marriage being pretty cool sometimes.

A typical K group session for me started with sitting around drinking properly brewed, non-Haus coffee and eating whatever delicious thing that Gretchen from the kitchen staff had brought to share with us. We would then sit and chat and, when everyone had sunk into their comfortably crowded cushions, we would go around in a circle and give updates about our lives.

"How about you, Dan? How are you doing?" asked Paul.

"My life continues to be a rocket propelled joyride to ever-greater heights of adventure and happiness," I said, deadpan.

"That's good," he said, nodding his glorious brown beard slowly. "I mean, it's obviously total bull but—"

"How dare you, sir."

"Dude, you've given that answer every week. Your rocket ship must have hit some turbulence or a little asteroid or something. Sheila and I just feel like we're not doing our job unless you tell us how miserable you are." Sheila nodded behind her cup of tea.

"Listen," I said. "I'm living by the beach in Germany studying the Bible."

Which I don't know if I believe in sometimes.

"The people are great, you guys are great."

And I don't want to bum you out with my melodramatic young adult heartbreak saga.

"We're going on a hike in the Alps tomorrow. I'm drinking real coffee right now."

Actually both pretty sweet facts.

"And I've already made some good friends."

One of whom is a girl who shares my ex-girlfriend's extremely uncommon name and I can't stop imagining our wedding and the little babies we'll have and the crazy story about how we met, except I've only talked to her once, during which time she told me she would stop talking to any guy who hit on her, which I then proceeded to not entirely unsubtly do, and with a really bad children's literature reference to boot.

"Life is pretty much the best."

"Alright, fine." said Paul. "But when the Klingons launch photon cannons at your ship..."

"You'll be the people I call up to the Holodeck," I promised.

Shift

I guess there are words for the kind of beautiful that it was.

But that wasn't really the point. The snow hoods on cliffhanger peaks, the Oz capitol green of the wind brushed grass, the stone palette of acrylic greys; they were aesthetics. The Swiss Alps looked awesome. That wasn't it though. Being there. Just existing. That was the point. Like how a picture of steak is different than a bite of it.

By the time I'd hiked up to the lake, the group I'd been chasing were already unpacking lunches on the rocks. Having spent a considerable amount of time looking at it, it was easy to spot the back of her head in the dots of people milling around the shore. She was alone on a boulder watching a small collection of Bible school hooligans tossing their sneakers together in a pile and plunging into water that was getting ready to become ice again. I mounted the rock next to her, careful not to make eye contact. Making eye contact while trying to flirt with Aidlyn Penner was like tossing a can of spinach to Popeye before challenging him to an arm wrestling match.

"How's the schnitzel?" I asked, removing my breaded porkchop sandwich from its plastic bag. I figured that was a safe way to initiate conversation.

She swallowed a bite of apple. "Vegetarian," she said in way of reminder. Then she cocked her head to the side. "Eh, sort of."

"Oh right," I said. "Recreationally." She nodded. "...Is that an animal cruelty thing or—"

"I'm just not a big fan of meat," she said. "Also it's a pretty inefficient source of food because—"

"It takes more food to grow a cow than you get from it?"

"Ginau," she said, tapping the tip of her nose.

Ginau is a German word that we were instructed to use in response if we wanted to make people think we understood German. It basically means, "Exactly."

"The nose knows?" she explained, tapping her nose again after a moment of my silence. "Have you played charades?"

You nose it! Ha!

I tapped my nose in response, happy that I kept my mouth shut at the appropriate time for once. "Ethically I'm right there with you about the vegetarianism," I said. "But I think I still like meat too much to become a good person."

"Well we can't all be perfect," she said. After an inappropriate silence on my part she added, "That was a joke by the way? I mean, I realize that sitting here on this rock eating my apple I look perfect—and also a little like a mermaid so score—" she made a checkmark with her finger, "but I put my sneaks on one foot at a time just like everyone else." She took a last bite of apple and scattered a school of fish with the core. "Doing the laces is still a little tricky though."

"I have a bunny around a tree and into a hole metaphor that could help with that."

"Does it have music?"

"I guess it could."

"I'm all ears. In the key of G if you don't mind."

"Sure," I said. "Obviously I know what G sounds like but just for fun let's pretend like I don't."

"Geee," she sang a perfect G note. Probably. Sounded perfect to me.

I cleared my throat. "Baaa," I tested the note.

"I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"

"Baa?"

"One more time."

"Baa."

"I went walking yesterday and we saw sheep in someone's backyard. I was freaking out because you only see sheep in zoos in Manitoba."

"You mean Manitobaa?"

You're killing me Daniel.

She touched a finger to her nose, smiling at the cabins across the river.

A moment of silence.

"I'm sorry," I said, referring to my bad pun.

She smirked and cocked her head sideways again. "Interesting."

"What is?" I asked.

She just shook her head. "I'm going to continue walking," she said, standing up on the rock. "Would you care to join me?"

"Hmm? Oh, yes," I said. Then, raising a hand to my forehead, I added, "Lead the way, captain."

—

We joined wolf-loving Maxwell soon into the second leg of the hike up Ebenalp. The three of us together then broke loose of our school crowd and became more or less alone on our winding hike up the mountain. We skirted cliffs and passed through a lodge. We crossed bridges and felt our way through caves and finally powered up the steep grassy knoll to the mountain peak chalet. Soon our three warm bodies leaned against the outside wall of the restaurant, cooling with the unobstructed breeze and deep sips of carbonated apple juice. For some reason, by the way, Europeans carbonate everything. Juice, liquor, drinking fountains. I bet there's even a little machine to add bubble to your pee in the u-bend of their toilets.

Cool as it would have been to sit inside a Swiss chalet on top of an Alpen mountain, seats in the hut came with a one purchase minimum. It costs a golden goose just to blow your nose in Switzerland. And buying food? Forget it. Max, Aidlyn, and I didn't have everything in common, but something that we most certainly did was that we were cheap.

"It's all... a mystery. The future," Maxwell framed the view of the rolling green valleys below with his hands as Aidlyn and I tried to stay focused. Seven minutes earlier I'd asked him to tell us what he wanted to do with his life.

So it was my fault, really.

Aidlyn and I ate our packed snacks, nodding when it seemed appropriate.

"It's like that mountain." Max pointed to a high peak across the canyon we sat towards. "We can't tell what's past it. No way! We're on this mountain right now. We're miles from the top of that mountain. But if we just... keep moving, we'll get up there and then we'll see the next thing. And I think life..." yada yada. I was more focused on Aidlyn's amusement at Max's ten thousand word motivational cat poster speech than I was the speech itself.

Twenty minutes later, we missed the class photo. We hacked our way off the trail to get to the actual peak of Ebenalp, which was a just a glorified hump of rock jutting up near the chalet. There was no trail and it was covered in thick brush, so by the time the three of us reached the top we were a little cut up and leaf strewn sitting next to each other in the dirt.

"Good work, team," said Aidlyn as we watched our Constance Haus compatriots all smile for the picture. We didn't mind missing it. Some moments you don't need pictures to remember.

The First Snowfall

Bread was in the air.

I guess love might have been as well but if it was then it was masked by bread. I answered her question, lifting the packaged pastry and saying, "It's a cake base."

Aidlyn and I were astride in the wonderfully odoriferous brote section of Constance Haus' nearest Kaufland (the German equivalent to Walmart just with lower ceilings and a more practical selection of breakfast cereals).

"Just a whole bottom of a cake?" said Aidlyn.

"For a dollar."

"A euro."

"Those are Greek."

"We could put Nutella on it."

"That was a joke."

"That's not even how you pronounce it," she said.

"Pronunce it," I mumbled to myself.

"What?"

"Never mind."

"What do you think?"

"About the cake?"

"Yes, but also just in general."

"I feel like you already know," I said. "You do that psychic thing."

"Why, whatever do you mean?" We took the cake base.

"The thing where you look at people and squint your eyes and say, 'Interesting' or, 'I know.'" I'd been studying her.

"Have you been studying me?"

"Uh, no. You've been studying me."

"Correct," she said as we put our items on the conveyor belt. "People say a lot of things without their words," she said, smiling at our cashier as we were handed our receipt. "Could you hold this for a sec?" she asked, handing me the grocery bag. I took it from her and she walked ahead of me. I caught up a moment later, realizing I'd been duped.

"So what do you know?"

"Everything."

"But really."

"That first time we met," she said as we exited the store, "I did some tests to see if you liked me or not."

"You did tests?"

"To see if you liked me," she said again. We had a couple miles of sidewalking back to school. "When people are talking to someone that they admire, they tend to copy their body language," she said. "When you sat down in the wifi room, I gave you a distinct wave. You copied it."

"Lots of people wave like that," I said.

"No they don't, and watch the bike." She tugged my sleeve just in time for me to sidestep the bicyclist coming up the sidewalk behind us. "But I also folded my hands in my lap like this." She interlocked her fingers and held them in front of me. "You did the same thing. I tried it on Max too. That's why I adopted you guys."

"..."

"Yes?"

"So you're like, kind of magic?"

She tilted her head to the side and I watched her eyes track some invisible bird across the sky before eventually she looked at me and shrugged. "Yeah. Something like that."

—

The design for the castle in the Disney logo is based off of an actual castle in Germany called Neuschwanstein. That's where we were. Eating off-brand Nutella smeared buns and bananas on a mountaintop across from an unpronounceable Disney castle as Max played old hobo songs on his harmonica.

The white stone of the castle rose into circular towers, dizzyingly high and capped with blue spires and fluttering flags. The structure topped the mountain across the chasm from us. It was a lower peak but still high enough in altitude to be dusted with a snowfall that the weather was still too warm for back at school. I was a tiny kid the last time I'd seen snow on the ground. When we'd first gotten off the bus by the castle, Max and Aidlyn had looked on amused as I'd leapt and rolled around in the white powder.

Max buzzed through a harmonica solo and then belted out Woody Guthrie lyrics loud enough for Sleeping Beauty to hear it across the river.

"Is the harmonica an effective babe magnet?" I asked to no one in particular.

Aidlyn nodded. "I have girls coming up to me all the time asking for, like, my permission to be into Max."

"What do you tell them?" I asked.

"I tell them to go talk to him," said Aidlyn, exasperated. "They are so so stupid. Also they think I'm dating both of you guys, so I get dirty looks from them when we're hanging out together. Girl politics, man."

"Your gender is trouble," I said, pulling the lighter out of my pocket instinctively. Aidlyn opened her mouth to argue, then instead shrugged and nodded.

"We also smell nice, though," she said.

"Worth it?"

She shook her head. "Probably not."

"Max, we should skip the whole deal," I said. "You and I can move to a state park and live in the wilderness like real men. If you're cool not getting married that is."

"I'm already married," said Maxwell. "To a lady named Freedom."

"Is she prettier than me?" asked Aidlyn.

"She's as beautiful as the night sky," he said. "Or a fresh sunset over the open desert."

"So... no?"

"I guess I'll probably end up getting married someday," I said. "Well... I dunno. It's just..."

shick

"I dunno."

clink

"Why do you do that?" asked Aidlyn.

"Do what?"

"The lighter." It occurred to me suddenly that I'd been opening and closing the thing.

"I figured you would know," I said. "What with the magic and all."

She brought her face up close to mine, eyes narrowed as she stared way down into my own.

"Whatcha doing there, Aidlyn?" asked Max.

She sat back. "Trying to read Daniel's mind."

"Is it working?"

"...No," she said, a little perturbed. "Actually it's not."

shick... clink

—

On the way back down the narrow switchback trail, I spent more time looking over my shoulder at Aidlyn than I did at my own feet. I remember noting the ice on her shoes and the loose gravel. We were almost to the bottom when her foot slipped and she stumbled sideways off the path. There was this moment with her slipping and me running and my hand grabbing her arm. When she was steady beside me on the path again she stopped and looked slowly from where my hand had been to my face. For the briefest of moments, her eyes were open wide enough with surprise that I could sense the edges of the secrets sunk deep inside them. Whatever it was that I saw in that moment, she saw me seeing it, and somehow this silent understanding of the two of us became her removing her mitten and lifting her naked hand in front of my face. She didn't say a word, she just spread her fingers apart and like the first step to some fondly worn dance I did the same and our fingertips touched for the last sliver of the moment.

"You good, Aidlyn?" asked Max.

"I'm well," Aidlyn corrected. "Sorry. I mean, yes. I am."

Echoes

My talks with God were pretty one-sided.

Every couple of weeks we had a designated lecture block set aside to go find a quiet place to pray on our own. The dirty concrete slab under the bridge about a mile down the road from school was mine. I would head off with my jacket unzipped and sit there with my Bible and read and pray and try to sit still long enough to listen. A lot of our speakers talked about listening. Very important, they told me. They didn't mention what it was that I was supposed to hear, though. I mean, I never heard The Voice of God. I've never been visited by an angel or anything.

The Bible isn't really clear on how God communicates, either. Sometimes He's a burning bush or a soft whisper or a fire tornado or a surprise wrestler or a guy born in a cave with a bunch of animals. There's one passage in the book of Daniel where the invisible hand of God, in the presence of the wicked king Belshazzar, writes four words on the palace wall. That's where the idiom "the writing on the wall" comes from. Something spelled out so even an idiot can't miss it.

When I prayed under the bridge, I told God about how much I liked Aidlyn. I told him about how I really wanted to date her, even though Constance Haus was this spiritual haven and monks and finding truth in the wilderness and all that. I talked to Him about the other Adilyn too. Most of the time she just seemed like something from a million years ago. Every now and again, though, a switch would flip in my brain and for thirty seconds I would hate her.

Just for thirty seconds though.

Then I had to let it be over again because otherwise I knew it never would be.

I was walking to the bridge, skirting the edge of a big orchard that ran along the road after the sidewalk ended. Row by long neat row the apples passed by and the clouds sprinkled a kind rain and I started bringing up fresh thoughts to God in my head.

And it was good.

Right then I believed in God.

I felt like God was there and I was just talking to a person.

It kind of sucks that so many people picture Christianity as an organization or a set of rules when really it's just a relationship. When you imagine God as a person with thoughts and feelings and desires, then the whole thing starts to seem a lot less like some crazy club started by bearded dudes and a lot more like the missing piece missing inside all of us.

"You look wet," said Aidlyn, passing me in the opposite direction.

"Little bit."

"You know, you'd be less wet if you zipped up your jacket."

"Probably."

"I see you're stealing my spot."

"Under the bridge?"

She touched her nose.

"I've never seen you down there," I said. "I didn't know anyone else knew about that place."

"Oba yo," she said.

"Sorry?"

"Don't be. It's low German. Mennonite thing," she said as she always did when she made such references. "It means, 'For sure.' As in, 'Hey, do you want to go to the thrift store with me to purchase some modest hand knit clothing?' 'Oba yo!' Get with it, Foutz."

"Right."

From my understanding at the time, being a Manitoba Mennonite was like being in a club where you all share in jokes and eat the same foods and can sing perfect twelve part harmonies to old hymns. Theologically they're basically identical to most other denominations of the Christian church in North America but the cultural gap is pretty massive. Aidlyn was a total geek about Mennonite history. It was one of the only topics you could get her to ramble about.

"Peace," she said, holding up two fingers. "My Bible is getting wet. Have a good time with Yeshua."

Yeshua is Jesus' Aramaic name. Max and Aidlyn and I agreed that we all liked the sound of Yeshua better because it had less negative connotations with obnoxious Christians. Ironically, the anglicized form of Yeshua is Joshua.

So yeah.

Jesus is a Josh too.

"You could've brought an umbrella," I said as she passed me.

She did a little ballerina pirouette and walked backwards. "I never use umbrellas," she said. With that she went back to school and I went down to the river to pray.

—

It was scrawled as elegantly as a person can manage with a purple ballpoint pen on an unpainted concrete surface. She had to have done it. I'd seen all of the other scraps of graffiti scribbled and spray painted under the bridge and this was the only one written in English. Around it were a few smaller bits of writing; Bible verses, quotes, and little doodles. But the writing on the wall was big and clear, each cursive letter traced a few times over to ensure the ink would stand out. Over the words was a drawing of an open umbrella. It said this:

Because I love you

It was like a clue. Or maybe a challenge. At any rate, I felt sure that she'd left it for me.

Chasing Horses

Aidlyn was a person you could never find in the place you last left her.

Maybe it was from years living in a farmhouse in the eye straining flatness of snow sunk Manitoba or the sense of freedom that came with being disconnected from the expectations of her old community. Whatever it was, it seemed to me that the world could never be big enough for her.

I learned to track Aidlyn by searching for unturned rocks, locked doors, caution signs; the tiny corners of the ordinary world where unlikely adventure could still be found. Those places: the underground tunnels and castle walls and unwatched construction sites; they were the spots where you could find the letter A scrawled in purple pen. More and more often you would the letter D right next to it. A little less bold maybe, but there nonetheless in the same borrowed ink.

I found her that day in the church. Not our church, the cafechurchetorium, but the Catholic church nested in the little town square. The hour chiming clock steeple rose up from the small crowd around it; either a narrow survivor of the bombing in World War II or a faithful reproduction. In front of the building there was a tree that had outgrown the mason's expectations and begun to make ripples and cracks in the smooth rubble ground around its trunk and above its roots. On the other side of the tree was a sign flaunting a cartoon pinup girl hung above the Hell's Angels biker bar.

The fallen leaves crunched under my sneaks as I made my way a little cautiously up the steps and into the vestibule. I poked my head in before entering to ensure I wasn't interrupting any Catholic stuff. It was empty inside. Dark too, save for the dancing orange light of the votive candles offered in prayer for lost souls or lost dogs or whatever the people of Fishbach wanted to put in a request to God for.

She wasn't down in the pews.

Her silhouette sat up against the stained glass in the dusty stone windowsill in the back corner. She had a journal in her hands and a Bible by her side and looked like a picture other girls would take of themselves while pretending to be someone they weren't.

"You have to know what it means," I said to her as we walked down the steps. "I mean you did write it, right?"

She hopped up on the wall that hugged the tree and balanced with little spins and sautés like a wobbly ballerina. "Yup," she said. Aidlyn loved ballerinas, a detail which just served to complicate the puzzle of her in my head.

"So what is it?" I asked. "Because I love you?"

Landing next to me with a bow and flourish she said, "Tell you what. You tell me about your lighter and I'll tell you what because I love you means." We passed the empty biker bar. As we approached the curb, I held up a hand to warn the oncoming cars to stop. Aidlyn was already halfway across the street in front of me.

I blew out October air out in a faint mist. "That's not a very happy story, Aidlyn. I don't want to bum you out with my stupid old life melodrama."

"Is it an important story?"

"Important? Not really. I mean, only to me."

"Then it's important. I want to hear it."

"Why?"

"Because people need people," said Aidlyn. "They need people to tell their depressing stories to."

She was always saying stuff like that.

"Okay," I said. "But not now. Come to the beach with me after supper."

"Why?"

"Because it won't sound as big as it felt if I tell the story in daylight."

—

We sat in the sand at the bottom of Germany. The swans huddled on the water, the sun was a hazy memory, and the lights were on in Switzerland. I held the lighter in front of me and stared out at Ebenalp's rough outline through the fog over the lake. During the night, a radio tower or something blinked a powerful red light on and off from somewhere in that cluster of mountains.

"Once upon a time there was a boy and a girl who lived in the Philippines." I told her the story of me chasing a someday with some girl back somewhere on the wrong side of the rainbow. I told her everything as one by one Switzerland lights blinked dark and she sat there with the moonlight reflecting blue in her eyes.

"I've never met another Adilyn," she said when I was done.

"Neither have I."

"Question." She raised her hand. "And I have several of these, so get ready."

"Yes, Aidlyn," I pointed to her.

"Are you aware that you were speaking in a British accent for most of that story?"

"Uh, yeah. That happens sometimes when I tell stories like this. I don't really know why I do it. Sometimes I don't even realize."

"You're distancing yourself," said Aidlyn. "You're uncomfortable with talking about your feelings so you like, switch to a narrator voice and then it feels less like you're talking about yourself and more like you're telling a story."

She nailed it.

"I'll never doubt you again. Yes, Aidlyn," I said as she raised her hand again.

"Did you love her?"

shick... clink

I looked down at the lighter. "Yeah. I mean... I figure I must have, right? You don't do all that without..." I looked from the thing my hands to Aidlyn's face, unsure. "What do you think?"

"About what?"

"Just in general."

"I feel mad," she said. "That someone could do that to you. That this girl did do that to you. I just—" Her voice broke off with a sad sigh and she emptied sympathy from her eyes to mine in a quick glance. "In my head as you were telling the story, I was making these notes about all of the shitty, manipulative things she was doing that you weren't realizing. It reminded me of things I used to do. It made me want to go grab Adilyn by the shoulders and shake her and tell her to just stop it. And you too. Like, I wanted to warn you about her. And say sorry. And it just really sucks that you went through that." Her voice was softer than normal. "That's as your friend. As an audience member? I thought that was a good story." The leaked emotion in her voice was replaced by her usual calculated speech. "It had a structure and you told it carefully and I feel like I know the people you were talking about now. And I like your narrator voice," she added.

"Thank you," I said. I wondered if that was the first time she'd ever given me a compliment.

"Also you didn't love her," she said matter of factly. "That's my diagnosis."

"Why do... what do you mean?"

"Just a theory," said Aidlyn. "We'll see."

I shrugged. "You're the expert."

"And you explained where the lighter came from but you never told me why you carry it around with you all the time."

"Oh. Yeah, I guess I didn't. I guess I thought I'd explain my way to it in the story but... I don't know. I'm not sure why I do it."

"I think I know," she said. "But anyway, deal's a deal. You totally bailed on your end but it was a good story so you'll be forgiven."

"You are indeed merciful." I rearranged my posture from facing out across the water to facing Aidlyn directly, legs crossed, elbows on my knees leaning in to hear the explanation.

"I like the idea of pursuit," she began. "A person chasing after another person. Being genuinely good to someone without an ulterior motive and without trying to make them like you or make a good impression or get them to give you something or get in their pants. To be genuine and intentional and interested and to just know someone. To really invest what it takes to know someone. To give part of yourself to do that.

"I was thinking about that under the bridge. And about my mom. I sat and realized that I will never love my mom as much as she loves me. And, like, she knows that. She knows that she will always love me more than I could ever love her back. But she just keeps loving me. She keeps being my mom. She keeps caring and asking questions and investing in me. Because she loves me."

"So it's about your mom?"

She shook her head. "I love the idea of love like that. I want to love people like that. I want people to love me like that and... yeah. Ginau. That's pretty much it."

I'd be lying if I told you that I hadn't wanted her to say, "Because I love you, Daniel." I did. I totally did. I thought this was the turning point where the girl who couldn't be touched would make an exception and throw open her arms and, "I wrote you letters every day for a year" or whatever. But I would also be lying if I told you that I was disappointed with her answer. She might not have been secretly telling me that she loved me in purple pen under the bridge, but she told me how to love her, even if she wouldn't love me back. She made that idea beautiful.

"What about the umbrella?" I asked.

"Oh, that's my icon. Like, if I were a superhero, they would shine an umbrella in the sky and I would go save the day."

"Why an umbrella?"

"Umm, because it keeps people from getting wet."

"Yeah but what does that mean? Metaphorically speaking."

"Metaphorically? I'm gonna die if we don't get Max to share some snacks with us."

"Interesting."

"You don't know anything," said Aidlyn, brushing sand off of her pants.

I sighed. "Yeah."

But I was starting to.

Evening(s)

after

before

after

before

get it?

got it.

good.

I'm somehow walking and taking off socks at the same time; headed unceasably to the door.

"The school building will be locked in less than two hours, Daniel," says Max. "There's no way you can run there and back in time." He observes me shoving my socks in the brochure basket by the door. "Also you're not wearing shoes?"

I say, "Okay so I'm probably gonna go now."

"Okay, Daniel," he says, having learned, I guess, a certain resignation to my impracticalities.

She left two days earlier with a team to run a one week English language class in another city.

She's gone. She's gone but she'll be back. That's fine. Everything's fine. I could run forever. I can run so fast. I think these things because right now my brain is making drugs.

I love it when my brain makes drugs.

She ran out into the dark rain without boots or coat. I saw her out of the corner of my eye as our evening lecture on A.W. Tozer's, The Pursuit of God wound to a close. We ended in prayer but my eyes stayed open, watching the sliver of foyer visible through the door, hoping to see her slip back inside.

But she didn't.

They probably think I'm crazy.

I run down the street without shoes. Fast feet slapping concrete and I'm grinning a grin so big like the happy I feel doesn't fit on my face. I'm so fast. This song is the best song I've ever heard. She's coming back and I'm so happy and I'm so fast and I'm going to get burgers, but first I'm going to jump in the Bodensee because... well because why not? Because I can do anything. Because I could swim to Antarctica. One... Two... Seven.

I leap out into the water and sink down down down and I'm so so happy.

I didn't even bother to grab my jacket in the hurry to follow her out the door. She was long gone. I went to the beach first. There was a storm brewing. The warning lights flashed red over the rocks as I searched and more and more this bad feeling expanded in my brain. I wandered for a while, periodically calling her name as the rain spattered my lenses.

"Aidlyn!"

For some reason it all felt direly significant. There was something inside that made me sure that I needed to go looking for her. I had to find her and help her. Or stop her. I didn't know from what. Something bad. It just seemed like something bad. Maybe it was the thing in my head.

Maybe I just wanted to be a hero.

I put the money on the McDonald's counter as I drip all over the floor. The man at the register hardly blinks at me. He's probably thinking something like, "Typical American."

To be her hero.

I love him. I love this McDonald's man. I don't tell him that though because I'm dripping wet and I don't have much time. But I love him.

I love everybody.

She wasn't under the bridge or curled up in the window sill in the Catholic church. She wasn't strolling through the woods behind town or at the river or sitting at a table outside café Schwarz. I searched the whole wide world of Fishbach and didn't find her.

So, reluctantly, I turned to waddle back where I'd come from.

Max is talking to his roommate, Tanner on the bench just outside the main entrance to the school as I get back all wet. I love Max. I love Tanner.

I couldn't go in the building. She had to come back eventually.

"Hey, Max!" I shout.

"No way!"

I throw him a burger and I say, "As promised." That sounded cool, I think. I'm so cool right now. Why can't I always be this cool?

"If I were to make a list of things that are making me extremely happy," says dear, darling, wonderful Max. "This would be on that list."

I sat on the bench, resigning myself to the wet beneath me as it sponged into my clothes.

"Why are you wet?" asks Tanner. Good old Tanner. "And why... burgers?"

"Wait, yeah, why are you wet?" asks Max as he unwraps his.

I waited. And waited.

"Also where did the umbrella come from?

I waited for the something that was sure to happen to happen.

"I found this on the way back," I say. I wave the umbrella around. "It's a metaphor. Also, I jumped in the lake."

It didn't.

"Wait, what?" asks Tanner.

One of the staff came out to lock the building.

I say, "I gotta go shower before lockup."

I wrung myself out and slouched back inside. I was worried and I wasn't a hero and I didn't know if she was still out there somewhere.

Max shakes his head at me and he smiles and he says, "You're a legend, Daniel."

"Why?" Asked Aidlyn.

"Why what?"

"Why did you go looking for me?" It was the next day. She and I were sidewalking

I sit on my mattress after the shower and I turn the street umbrella around in my hands. I can solve the puzzle. I can do anything. I'm so so happy. And I fall asleep so fast and my dreams are awesome and I'm awesome and everything is awesome and Aidlyn, Aidlyn, Aidlyn.

"The way you were running..." I said.

My brain isn't doing anything special on the day she comes back. It's a normal day in innerspace but it's a wonderful normal day because she is back. The note I give her says this:

At 7:30, take friend Max under the bridge.

"I've run out into the dark like that before," I said to her.

Find a large stone and throw it into the water.

"I was just afraid that you were doing it for the same reasons I did."

And wait there for the treasure.

I looked at her with eyes that might not have been able to stop a beast of prey in its tracks but which were slowing her sidewalk steps all the same.

By the time she opens the note I have already disappeared through the crowd of returning English team members. The day before I timed out the steps, but that was in daylight when I could see everything.

I have to run.

"Because I was worried about you," I said to her.

The rock they toss splashes into the water, signaling me. I flood the space under the bridge with music as Aidlyn and Max reach the bottom of the stairs and the balloons I release begin to float by and I shine a light on the opposite wall.

"Because I love you."

I made my mural with bold black marker and wrote the words in cursive just like her own on the opposite wall. I wrote four words and drew two penguins. In the drawing, the first penguin is looking down at its feet and the other is holding an umbrella over its friend's tired head.

"You made this?" Aidlyn stands next to me on the riparian slab, staring at marker words and phosphorescent penguins.

"Happy birthday," I tell her. The song crescendoes and the singer sings the bit about this Rubik's cube he just can't figure out. "There's also presents," I add. "All wrapped in recycled materials, you'll be happy to hear. Oh and there's cake base cake, of course. I hoarded Nutella packets from every breakfast this week."

We watch the last of the balloons ripple down the brook. Max is standing off to the side, pretending to be interested in a tree root. I love Max.

Aidlyn touched a hand to her cheek. "Daniel, this is..." She was, there on the sidewalk, something I had never seen her be:

Speechless.

"Are you okay?" I ask.

She nods.

"I feel warm," she said simply. "Right here."

She points to her chest. "You're making the thing happen again," she whispers under the bridge. "Like it's warm inside."

"Is it a good thing?" I asked.

She nodded yes. "I haven't felt that," she explained simply. "Not for a while now. Not like this."

"What have you done to me?" She asks slowly, eyes looking up to search my own.

She reached out her hand.

In the mellifluous echoes, I feel her fingers against mine. No gloves. I am touching her and she is touching me and it is intentional and my brain isn't making drugs but I am so so happy.

"Magic?" I suggest.

"Yup," she nods. "Totally."

November

Everyone went away except us.

They all climbed into bellies of trains and planes and Volkswagen rentals to ride wheels round in circles across the continent in search of the thing that fills the adventure cup. Our adventures cups were dripping so full of Bodensee water that Max, Aidlyn, and I didn't see a need to go looking for it anywhere else. Also, as I've said: We were cheap.

She hadn't showered that morning. Her clothes had those subtle wrinkles like the corners of her half closed eyes as she did the one two three stirring of the coffee spoon in the French press. Her nose ring was back in. She hadn't put on shoes or socks but she had her nose ring in because there was no one left to stop her. I watched from the doorway as she lowered the plunger into the brown water and the wispy promises of coffee lingered up against her face.

She wasn't wearing glasses.

She often didn't wear her glasses.

Maybe it was forgetfulness or maybe it was vanity. I had to remind myself that she was susceptible to stuff like that just like everyone else. That she wasn't literally magical. I made myself remember that because if I didn't then I wouldn't be able to trust myself with the genuine belief that there was something truly special about her.

It wasn't the shape of her in that way that it's so easy to believe wonderful things about people who are shaped the "right" way. It was partly the shape of her, though, in the sense that she was her shape. The way she and no one else looked and the way she and her curves and lines slid into clothes that were so neatly her shaped as well but then she quietly muffled that with grandma's yarn sweaters.

But it was more than that, too.

I mean, everyone is more than that but this "more than" quality I mean is like a little boy standing on the beach with his ankles in the water saying that the ocean is more than big.

It wasn't even her eyes.

As many kinds of blue that swam in them with the white flashes like suspended memories or starlight and as knee wobbling as it was when they snapped onto mine—and I swear looked straight into my soul—that wasn't it. That wasn't the point. That wasn't what kept me up at night and made me consider with a shudder each day that I knew her that doing so possibly meant that I was being allowed to live a rarer life than most.

It was being there.

That was it.

Being there, across the table from her as she slid me a cup of crushed up beans soaked up into honest to goodness non Eurocarbonated water. Sitting there, drinking coffee with her immaculate mess of a self, and being my own mess, and just being there. Seeing her and knowing that there wasn't anyone out there who I would rather be drinking coffee with on a quiet morning.

Or on any morning.

Or afternoon or night or any time at all, really.

I'd wake up at two in the morning to be across a table sitting messy quiet with her sipping coffee and just existing like that.

"What?" I asked. She'd been looking at me with her head cocked sideways and her mouth barely open.

Aidlyn knit her eyebrows together and smiled that smile you do when you're about to say something you know is at least a little bit ridiculous. "Do you think this is what being married is like?"

I looked around. A room empty save for us and the coffee spoon. "I dunno."

"I think I would like this," she said.

I finished the last dregs of my cup. I didn't know how much of my hand to show. What I said, regardless of the not-knowing, was, "I don't know if being married is like this. I mean, if it is then I can't imagine how so many people still end up divorced. But yeah," I nodded, looking again at the nothing much around us. "I think I would like this too."

She nodded. Maybe not in agreeance as much as with her own contemplations off in Aidlyn world. Things went silent for another while.

"More coffee, dear?"

She set her cup down slowly, looked at me gravely and said, "Never. Again."

"Okay, pumpkin."

She left to find Max.

—

People came back from Travel Weekend with stories of ski trips and Polish jazz clubs and adventures of getting lost off in foreign lands. They saw cities, mountains, and people in staggering variety and beauty. Between them they had first kisses and slow dances and late nights in hostels round tables with their lives' greatest friends. Some made unexpected trips to hospitals, went broke, got in trouble with law enforcement, and narrowly escaped deaths of varying kinds.

They had all sorts of adventures.

But none of them, I assure you, came close to the week that I had with Max and Aidlyn. We mattress surfed down staircases and filled the tiny phone booth room from floor to ceiling with balloons and threw a rave inside with music and flashing lights. We hid people's mail and left them treasure maps to follow to retrieve it. We spent a day biking along the Bodensee and Aidlyn and I wrote our initials on a lakeside castle wall as Max looked on with disapproval. We went to Lindau by the Austrian border and she and I played bad guitar and sang for money and received none. But we made the people who passed us smile. We made ourselves smile.

We converted one of the basement rooms into a movie theater with a construction of blankets and pillows. There in the soft quilt cinema we watched Into the Wild. The three of us lay there in the fort watching and she was so close and I wanted to grab her hand under the blanket or put an arm around her or something. We watched the whole movie and then we started another one and Aidlyn got a message on her phone and then her face changed and I knew something was wrong. When the credits rolled, Max went up to hang out with a girl named Rose, who was also hanging around school, and I asked Aidlyn what was wrong. She told me her grandmother had just died.

She and I sat alongside each other, leaned up against the wall. The motion activated lights went off as she told me stories of Manitoba and family and Mennonites and this big chunk of her life she missed back there where she'd left it.

"When I was little, I wanted to be like Martin Luther," she said. "Nail my theses to the Mennonite church door and figure out how to get people to love people properly." There were tears hiding in her eyes. They didn't escape but they were there, brimming at the corners. "Nana was old, but, I mean..." she sighed. "I was always so excited to graduate and move far away and start my own life a million miles away. But it's home. Back there. I thought it was only home because it was where I grew up, but it's not. It's part of me. All of it. And I care," she said. "I went years without really caring about anything. But I care."

"I'm sorry it's so far away."

"Yeah." She sighed. "Is that was the Philippines is like for you?"

I thought about it for a second. "No," I said, honestly. "It's not."

"So what's home for you, then?"

Missionary kids hear this question all the time. Most of the time we don't have answers.

"Right now?" I asked. "It's right here. Now tell me about the Mennonites."

"Right, because you want to hear more about how Ukranian immigration affected church doctrine."

"You listened to me talk for like an hour about my ex girlfriend. You listen to everybody tell their life stories and you listen better than anybody I've ever met before. I won't pretend that I'm dying to know how Ukranian immigrants doctored up the Mennonite church. But I am interested in listening to you."

"It's late."

I shook my head.

"Look, I know you're doing the man thing or whatever but really, I'll be okay. I don't want you to feel like you need to stay."

"I'd sit here all night listening to you talk about immigrating Ukranians. I'd listen to you read the dictionary."

I'll tell you what, I learned a lot of things about Ukranian immigration that night that I don't remember now. What I do remember is being there with her being there. I remember feeling warm. I remember being happy to know her.

We went upstairs, expecting a dark empty building. Entering the Honeycomb, however, we discovered Max and Rose spinning themselves in circles on the ground with a small graveyard of German soda bottles in the corner. Aidlyn and I joined them, spinning on our backs, picking up floor dust and staring at the tiny pencil hole communion wafer ceiling. There, the four of us, sharing sugared beverages and chocolate, stayed awake for hours. We talked about wonderful hyperactive nonsense. I don't remember any of it. It wasn't the point.

When Aidlyn finally said goodnight, the sun was almost up. She headed off for her room. I followed soon after, pushing open the door to the staircase landing to find her waiting there.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"Daniel?"

"Yes, Aidlyn?"

"May I hug you?"

It was such a simple, innocent thing.

It meant so very much.

I said, "You may."

She slid herself up against my chest and tied her hands together around my back. I wrapped my own around her.

"Okay," she said, taking back her arms. "Night."

"Goodnight, Aidlyn."

Through Blue Light

And now it's time for the titillating conclusion of...

The Tongue & the Breast Swiss

She gazes into his eyes like a duck ponders a sausage and they hold each other there alone outside the boiler room.

"I missed you, Ricky!" says young Texan beauty queen, Dakota Conwell to her newly reunited lover.

Rugged extreme sports athlete, Ricky Sombrero says with all the passion in his heart, "Dude, totally. Me too."

She melts and begs him to regale the story of his adventures.

"Well, we went to Switzerland to do some skiing. That was pretty sick."

Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that movie Cliffhanger, she hangs on the cliff of his every word.

"We thrashed so much powder there," he says, struck in memory by the beauty of it all. "Pretty killer."

"Sounds fun," she says, trying not to betray the deep sting in her heart at being cast aside while the man she loved gallivanted through the Swiss mountains.

"Oh, dude, Switzerland's nuts. At the lodge we were just watching, like, some regular TV news whatever and all the sudden this chick is just there, topless. Boobs out with nothing censored or anything. And we were all, 'No way!'"

Behind her perfect facade, Dakota boils with jealousy at the Swiss TV lady boobs. How could her Ricky be so callous in his admirations of another!? With tactful subtlety she says, "Yeah, I bet you really like that."

He laughs. The slightest touch of guilt. The faintest hint of nervous quiver. "Yeah, dude! It was dope. I wish chicks got topless in American news."

"Whatever." Somehow she finds the strength to forgive him. He is, after all, a beast of passion. The way his hand caresses just high enough to not technically be booty grabbing but low enough to be clear that he'd grab booty all day if she permitted such animal departures of lust.

"Did you do any shopping?" she asks him.

"Yeah, I got these shoes in Prague."

"Oh," she is crestfallen. Like a struck angel plummeting from heaven. "I was gonna take you shoe shopping at H&M tomorrow." With the mighty strength of a lioness she keeps shut the floodgates of tears.

"Oh, dude," tenderly his words reach her like the first sunbeams after a night's storm. "We can totally still go. I only have like, one other pair of shoes."

Like Lazarus blinking in life's returning light, her hope of two bodies close in clothing retail heaven together return and she is blinded in ecstasy. "Cool."

Then, looking to her soul, he asks her the great question all lovers must be tested with. "But you do like my Pumas, right?"

"Yeah," she says. "They're cool."

With that mythic profession of undying love, the two bind themselves close with tongues just waaaay down slurping and suckin' and "mm" and "don't touch my bum."

Love like theirs is the reason flowers bloom.

The End

I turned to Aidlyn in our hiding spot under the stairs and she mimed gagging at Rick and Dakota's kissing. We had been sitting there avoiding the returned crowd of Haus students when those two had shown up. It was like Christmas to us. A human ant farm. Live soap opera. They eventually left us alone together in the corner under the stairs by the boiler room. When curfew came we kind of just continued sitting there while everyone else streamed off to bed.

"Do you have something to tell me?" she asked after a long period of my staring wordlessly off into space.

I opened my mouth and closed it again.

"Come on, Daniel."

"Yeah," I whispered. We said everything in whispers.

"Are you going to drag this out for another hour or do you wanna just put on your big girl pants and say it?"

"I'm sorry?"

She raised her eyebrows. She was barely more than an outline in the dark but still she was so gorgeous. I began counting breaths as my heart beat louder and louder until I was sure she could hear it.

"Spit it out, Daniel."

Seventh breath.

"I like you, Aidlyn. Very very much. You're just—" I stopped halfway through the sentence with this sudden sinking feeling that I was maybe destroying the greatest friendship I had ever had. But there was no going back. "You are extraordinary," I said simply, abandoning the whispers now. "You're funny and you're clever and you're a total badass. You're beautiful as well, but I won't go into that because you don't even like it when people tell you you're beautiful because you don't need anyone to keep telling you that to believe it. You know how rare that is? Confidence?"

Her face was unreadably stoic as she waited for me to finish.

"And you love people," I said. "It's like you go hunting for people's problems and then get your hands dirty digging down into their stories and pulling out these things they buried. You're interested. You make people feel important. Honestly, Aidlyn, you're kind of my hero. And forget that I'm attracted to you and everything because I'm telling you all this even after you told me explicitly that doing so would mean you wouldn't talk to me anymore. If nothing else, I just want you to know how impressed I am by you. You make me want to be better. You make me believe I can be all the things I think you see in me when you look me in the eyes."

I waited a second to let my words sink down in the dark space we were in.

What I didn't tell her then but would later was that I had been addicted to porn since middle school. It was loving Aidlyn that made me understand finally how porn isn't just human nature or boys will be boys innocent sweep it under the rug behavior. It was the girl who didn't do anything unintentionally who made me see that you can't love people completely if you're willing to see them as objects like that in your brain. I wanted to love her as much as a person can love a person. So after seven years of trying and failing to quit, I quit the day I met her. No porn, no fantasies, no masturbation or anything. I was done.

"I have never felt the way about anyone that I feel about you," I told her. "So you'll be happy to know that you were right. I get it now. I didn't love Adilyn. Because whatever that was didn't come close to this."

She did her little laugh that she did to herself and cocked her head to the side and stared off at the wall.

Another longest pause.

The bright flashes in her eyes reflected the dim light and she watched me there in the dark. My own eyes clicked with hers and then we just communicated silently for a bit, like we were both checking to make sure that we could still look at each other the same way without it being weird. And it wasn't weird. Or whatever weird it might have been was a good weird anyway.

"Daniel?" she asked.

"Mm?"

"May I hold your hand?" After a moment she answered the question that my hesitancy asked by saying, "I know that you're safe. You make me feel safe. And besides." She leaned forward and looked at me conspiratorially. "Rules are made to be broken."

She stretched across the gap and folded her hand into mine. I rolled my thumb over her knuckles like Tenzing Norgay brushing ice from the top of Everest. She moved closer and I felt her side against mine and she could feel my heart beating fast through her sweater.

"Are you okay?" she whispered.

"I am so much more than okay."

"Okay."

"Okay... girlfriend?"

"Gross," she said. Before my heart could sink she said, "Teammate. I like that word better."

"Teammate?"

"Yeah. We can be on a team. Aidlyn and Daniel: Teammates."

"That's adorable."

"Shut up and put your arm around me."

Shortly after I had done so, the face of the girl's resident advisor, Laura, bent down to appear in front of us in the dark outside the boiler room. She looked sternly at us with the full severity that someone as nice as her could muster.

She said, "Don't let me catch you guys down here after curfew again." And then she walked away.

And with that, it all became a perfect moment.

—

Deep in the nuthouse, two veterans look around to try and catch any signs of a giant black dog.

The Stallion: What just happened?

Wallace: You know, Jason, I think we won.

The Stallion: Well then. Go team.

Glory Days

It was a riot of drunken Santa Clauses.

We watched from a Buckingham Palace bench as about half a dozen of the red velvet protestors peed on a tree in Green Park. Aidlyn, Max, and myself were in London for the first week of the Christmas holidays. When we landed in the city, we hopped on a bus, stepped off, and immediately, without discussion, followed the parade of inebriated Santas on their march to Buckingham.

The ornate fountain in the center of the square before us was clamoring with a good hundred or so drunken men and women all answering the chant of their Santa leader.

"What do we want!?"

"CHRISTMAS!"

"And when do we want it!?"

"NOW!"

I knew that I was in the middle of one of those moments that you refer to as "one of those moments" because it was one of those moments that simply was "one of those moments." The beautiful thing about that particular moment is that it didn't seem to stop.

After some standard complications brought about as results of our group's "plan not to have a plan" mentality, we were met by a silver haired man named David who pulled up in a matchbox sized car and squeezed us in for some introductions and an impromptour of the city.

"That is what a lot of people refer to as London Bridge," David lifted a finger as he bobbed and weaved through the traffic with noted aptitude.

"Is it not?" asked Max.

"No. You see—sorry what are your names again?"

Aidlyn introduced herself and then said, "And that's Daniel."

"And you know Max," Kate added from the front. Kate was our connection in London. Well, technically Kate was an old family friend of Max's so she was his connection. Kate was married to David, who was about twenty years her senior. Aidlyn and I had assumed this would be super weird until we met them both and then it kind of just made sense.

"I'm Max," said Max. Apparently.

"Just so we're clear, I'm letting you lot stay in my house to see if I can tick up enough karma to buy back the soul I lost to the Devil when I married an American."

"Don't mind him." Kate patted David on the cheek affectionately. "He's just old and cranky."

"And she's young and beautiful and married me for my money."

"Money?"

"I didn't say it was a good move on your part."

"I think my next husband will be the rich one," said Kate, twisting around to face us. "I married him for his body."

"We are now driving over London Bridge," said David. "As I said, a great many people think that that," he pointed to the bridge we had passed earlier, "is London Bridge. They're idiots of course because that is Tower Bridge. Though this isn't really the proper London bridge either. The original London bridge is gone."

"It fell down right?" asked Max. "Like the song?"

"Brilliant," said David. He was of that great aged variety of Englishman marinated in sarcasm and dripping with effortless wit. "Nice to see they're putting forth their best efforts over in the American school system."

"Be nice."

"I'm old, I don't have to be nice anymore."

"You're not that old."

"This morning you referred to me on the phone as your husband 'the dinosaur.'"

"Dinosaurs are cute," said Kate.

"I'm not cute," he scoffed. "I'm a man. I dig trenches, drink alcohol, run empires."

"You have scheduled tea times at work."

"Well I'm not a barbarian," said David. "But shut up, I have to illuminate the minds of these poor, mentally starved Americans."

"Daniel and I are Canadians," said Aidlyn.

"And I apologize for that but I'm trying to educate you at the moment, so if you will please leave the irreverence to your yankee friend then maybe when I'm done I'll give you your freedom of speech."

Aidlyn turned to me and whispered, "I like him."

"In the seventies," David continued, "some American man bought London Bridge, sent it brick by brick to Arizona, and had it painstakingly reconstructed in some little town in the desert."

"He bought London Bridge?" Max asked.

"Must've been the most bored billionaire on the planet," said David affirmatively. "Imagine going around buying bridges and popping them down in the middle of nowhere in some ridiculous country with trillions of guns and no tea time."

"I had no idea," I said.

"Most people don't. They drive over this bridge every day and even if they've the brains in their heads to know that it is the London Bridge they won't know that the original is now next to some greasy MacDonalds in the United States. There's no respect for history. Things happen and then they're forgotten about."

"They missed it enough to build a new one," I said.

"Rebuilding old things is trendy." David spoke with distaste for the word. "Nostalgia. This city is sentimented together."

He continued to point things out whilst Aidlyn propelled the conversation with her endless list of questions. They talked and I sat back and watched the world hurtle past me and let the words and people filled up the space. If I close my eyes just tightly enough now, I can pull myself back and peer over the edge of time and see all of that again. The Shard building towering and red double decker buses bustling past telephone boxes and box pedestal monuments and parks and cars parked by buildings from twelve different centuries of architecture all squished together like when your different colors of Play-Doh are mashed into one assimilated glob. What you wind up with isn't ugly though, it's a mosaic that sucks you right into the center of the millions of unarticulated Moliere faces streaming and bouncing and poddering over sidewalks and streets and underground tunnels and you're a part of it.

I'm a part of it. I was a part of it. Daniel was a part of it. Not me, Daniel, but the other Daniel.

One of them anyway.

—

Late mornings at Kate and David's were greeted with proper cups of coffee and horribly mangled omelettes. During the day we walked and made bad puns and saw cottages older than the countries we all grew up in and wondered and invented lives for the strangers who passed by. At the house in the later afternoon we would learn complicated card games and mooch expensive meals off of our generous hosts and I lost many hands of poker. Finally, when the sun went down on amazing after amazing day, I would find Aidlyn's hand and sit and talk and feel warm and loved and like I was finally in the right place.

Superlatives probably become more extreme as your life goes on. Maybe they taper off somewhere but I think most people would hope that the longer you live the better the "best" things in your life are. Like, perfection to a three year old could be a picture colored all inside the lines whereas perfection to a seventeen year old might be a pair of breasts or to a fifty year old perhaps the symphonies of Mozart and—I imagine—to an eighty year old, perfection might be lost somewhere way back during the time when breasts were the epitome of perfection when in fact the real perfection was the simplicity of it all; back when his bones could bend and snap to the flickering adjustments of a world plagued by time. As for my definitions, that time in London with my two best friends was almost as perfect as life can get.

Almost.

David and Kate welcomed us to stay longer but as wonderful as our visit was, we had seen almost nothing of the actual city of London, and that seemed like a wasted opportunity. We hopped on a train and booked what was, I assure you, the least expensive hostel in the Britain.

I wouldn't know how to describe the room that Max, Aidlyn, and myself shared (with about twelve others) without using words like "sardines" or "bread box" or "it was literally smaller than the amount of love that Hitler had for Jews." The beds were triple bunked and curtained off like a navy vessel. You could touch two walls no matter where you stood. I was on the top tier of the right wall of beds and Aidlyn was on the top of the opposite, which meant that when we returned from our first day of exploring London we slipped into the room of snoring foreigners, climbed over some faces, and drew curtains so that we could just see each other's eyes in the dark and watch each other fall asleep.

Winterlude

For once, she was following me.

We waved goodbye to Max, disappearing on his bus back to Germany for his missions trip, and then stepped back out into the London world. We were alone in a crowded city and we were young and everything around us was huge and we had nothing to achieve and no deadlines. She and I held hands on the subway tube as we shot and rattled under millions feet.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"This way," I said as we stepped off the train.

We got out onto the broken pavement and sidewalked through night puddles until we arrived at an old phone booth in the middle of a concrete island between Hyde Park and the clustered building wall around it. I took her inside and closed the door behind us. Standing that close we could see every little imperfection in each other's skin and something about the authenticity of that just made her even more beautiful to me.

"Your phone please, madam."

She handed it to me and for a moment I disappeared behind the little screen. The music I played bounced softly around us, filling up the glass box. I put my arms around her and we began to dance the way trees move in the breeze. It wasn't one box step, prom en ade, like another moment I can recall. It was just one, one, one, in single counts and single seconds and I didn't care about things changing for once because there in that telephone box time wasn't going anywhere. Beneath our sneakers were candy wrappers and broken glass fragments and clippings of soiled pornography. Outside the smudged window the London world carried on as normal with taxi cabs and people with parcels and tiny dogs and trolleys but inside that box time was the beat of the song and the way she felt that close to me.

I've brought you to this moment; the best moment of my life, so that for the next few sentences it can still be happening somewhere in someone's mind. It's as close as I'll ever get to time travel.

I lean in and I kiss her cheek. She sighs and reaches out and touches my face and looks in my eyes and tells me that I don't have to hold back. That this is okay. That she knows I'm safe. That she isn't scared and I don't have to be either. She says all this without any words and I understand so easily. I kiss her. I kiss her finally forever for a little while.

I tell her I love her. She doesn't say the words back and that's okay. I don't expect her to. I don't need her to. Because I know she loves me. I know that this, at last, is the Someday.

In that moment, I am not enough person to carry all the love I felt for her. So I'm still spilling it out on these once blank pages. Nothing has come close to that phone booth in London once upon a time ago. That fact is my fondest tragedy.

When You Go

We strolled through the park, like a Jane Austen novel with a garbage backpacking hobo tossed in.

We were in a place called the Italian Gardens, despite the fact that they were neither Italian nor gardens, really, as much as they were a bunch of white marble fountains. But, like a lot of things, it was pretty even though it made no sense and we walked and I had on my bag held together by the pure coursing spirit of adventure (and, y'know, duct tape) and Aidlyn's sister, who had arrived that morning, asked me a question.

"What's the West Highland Way?"

"It's a hiking trail in Scotland," I said.

"And you're going alone?"

"Correct."

"For ten days?"

"Roughly."

"To climb the highest mountain in the UK?"

"If things go well."

"In winter?"

"Which is why I brought Clive here."

"Clive?" Skyla turned to Aidlyn who rolled her eyes.

"It's the name of his pickaxe."

"Sounds like quite the adventure," said Sykla politely. "What ehm... how did this all start?"

"We watched Into the Wild and now he wants to go get himself killed in the woods."

"I mean, everyone has to go out and do something like this at some point, right?" I asked as we jaywalked at the intersection. "You walk down a path and overcome obstacles and you reach a goal. It's like life. Metaphorically speaking." We entered Lancaster Gate tube station. "To be honest, I'm not sure why I'm doing it. Maybe that's what I'll find out. Anyway, it was nice meeting you, Skyla."

"And you, my good sir." Being the knowing sister she was, Skyla then strolled over to the window and Aidlyn walked over close and looked up into my eyes severely.

"Why are you doing this? Really."

"To prove that... I can. I guess"

"That you can? That you can do what? Do whatever you want? By yourself, without help?"

"Not exactly."

"Well good, because you can't."

"What?"

"People need people," she said.

"I know."

"You need people. Do you know that too?"

"...Yeah."

She shook her head. "Don't. Die," she said. Then her stern eyes softened and her brows turned up and together as she added gently, "Please."

"I can't die, Aidlyn," I said. "I'm eighteen."

She touched my cheek and let her hand slide down to my arm. She grabbed on, pulled me in and whispered, "You are so stupid."

With my forehead up against hers I said, "I love you."

She pushed me off her gently. "Don't die."

"Have a good time with your family."

"You are not allowed to die."

"I'll see you in a week and a half."

"...Promise?"

We stood there looking at each other as people streamed in and out of the tube station turnstiles. Skyla was staring out the window.

I pulled out a silver rectangle and handed it to Aidlyn.

shick... clink

"Okay." She stuck out her hand. I shook it. She nodded, turned, and walked away. I turned and reached a hand out to insert my ticket into the turnstile machine only to hear her quick-sneaker footsteps and to feel her arms wrap around me quick and tight and right into my ear like music she said, "Write to me."

And I told her, "I will. Promise."

Hardship Acres

"Could I have some coffee please?"

The bartender stared wide-eyed as I dropped my soaking garbage bag wrapped backpack by the door. The thundering sound died down a little when the hinges swung closed and I shut my eyes with an exhale, so relieved to be out of the rain at last.

"Just black, thanks." I peeled off my jacket and slid into a high backed wooden chair as close as I could to the fire. Soon I had coffee in my hands and soup on the table.

"Damn, kid."

I looked up from the warm cup to notice the table next to me for the first time. Two couples in their fifties were staring quizzically at me over their meals.

"You kill a wolf or what?"

It took some time for my tired brain to step through his logic.

"Oh," I said. "The bag?"

"Lumpy garbage bag with an axe pokin' outta the top of it. You look like a poacher." The gentlemen was talking more to his table than to me. I had become their evening entertainment.

"It's for mountain climbing," I said. "And the garbage bag was to keep the rain off... I don't think it worked too well."

"Climbing? Hate to ruin your day but you're a long ways from the mountains."

"I know. I'm hiking the West Highland Way. Hopefully I'll get to Ben Nevis by the end of the week."

"You're hiking The Way now?" asked one of the ladies.

"You've heard of it?"

They all laughed at me.

"Right, I guess you would." I realized I had basically done the equivalent of asking someone from Florida if they'd heard of Disney World.

"We've hiked along The Way before, but not at this time of year."

"Especially in a storm like this," said the other lady.

"Yeah, the rain really picked up there."

"Well, there is that," she said. "But I was meaning about the wind. Have you seen the news?"

"Not for a while. I just got into Glasgow this morning."

"Took a bus from there?"

"No, I walked."

"Holy hell, kid!" exclaimed the first man. "No wonder you look like you got run over by a truck. What is that, thirty miles?"

"Something like that." It was, in fact, thirty-four.

"Do you have somewhere warm to sleep tonight?" the first woman asked. "I thought most of the Way lodges were closed this time of year."

I nodded, "They are. But I have a tent. Well, a bivvy sack anyway."

"Camping's not legal in Balmaha anymore," said the man. "Too many drunk hikers terrorizing the locals in summer."

"Oh," I said. It was the newest in a long string of oversights I had made in my slap dashed preparations.

"You'd better ask around, sweetie," said the other lady. "You can get a room at the inn here."

"It'd be expensive for just him though," the man said.

"That's true. But, I mean, he can't sleep out there in a... what did you call it?"

"A bivvy sack? It's a one pole tent that keeps the rain off your sleeping bag."

"Stay at the inn."

"Yeah, I may do that," I lied. "Thanks."

My debit card had been blocked while I was in London for whatever reason so the only cash I had was what I'd borrowed from Max before he left. It was enough for some food and maybe a night or two at a hostel in town at the end of the hike but certainly it wouldn't have covered a room at the inn.

"Is there a gas station in town?" I asked. I had planned to get gas for my camp stove at the end of my first day's hike to keep the pack a few pounds lighter.

The other man shook his head. "Closest one might be in Milton of Buchanan." Ten miles back where I'd come from.

"Are there any farther along on The Way?"

"I know there's one in Inverarnan." Two days of hiking North at the top of Loch Lomond. It was looking like I'd be eating ginger cookies and flatbread for a while.

I forced these sinking new pieces of information to the back of my mind and fished my iPad out from the dripping bag. The screen was fogged up from the cold but it turned on fine, thus becoming the first good news I'd had that day. I connected to the bar's wifi and typed up a couple of letters. The first was to my parents. It went like this:

Dear mom and dad. Still alive and Scotland is great. Love you!

—Daniel

The second letter was, of course, to Aidlyn. This one was a little more honest:

Aidlyn,

Walked a long way today. I am so tired and soaked to the bone. I'm sitting in a bar in Balmaha drinking a big cup of coffee and charging my iPad so I can have a map again. Got lost a few times today due to missing trail markers. I saw some beautiful landscapes today and also some really ugly ones. It's supposed to get better later on in the hike. This day has been so long. I miss you very much.

Love, Daniel

I slept under the hammering rain in my little tarp behind some bushes in the town park. My sleeping bag and clothes and everything was wet and I knew that I would have to leave early the next day so that I wouldn't get in trouble for having camped in the town illegally.

Everything was going wrong. I realized, shivering in a ball with fists jammed into my armpits on a near empty stomach with mucus sniffling nose, that I was going to be miserable for most of this trip. But writing to Aidlyn made me remember that all of it was only temporary. I would make it through and there would be some beautiful moments and at the end of it all, I would see her again. That thought kept me from panicking through the night as the cold tried to freeze my bones.

White Woods

It was dark as a debtors anonymous support group outside.

I stumbled into the trail marker at a maw of deep shrouded forest where, as if on dramatic cue, my keychain flashbulb fizzled and died.

Fine.

I just had to see the ground three feet in front of me. I just had to see enough trail to know my next step. I just needed to see—

rustle, rustle

"Hello?"

You're jumpy Daniel.

To see three feet in front of—

Thumpa Thump

"Is someone there?"

I stopped and peered around at the gnarled shadows. It was nothing but spears of blue night piercing gaps in the leaves.

"Come on, Daniel."

I laughed because I figured that if I laughed, it couldn't be real. You can't laugh right before getting eaten by wol—

Thumpa! Thump! THUMPA! THUMP!

I threw my bag down on the ground and pulled out Clive. I watched the shadow dart from one tree to another. Any doubts about there being something out there with me were gone and I was left with fifty feet of forest and the curved point of an ice axe between it and my pounding heart. The image of my scattered corpse lying on the trail flashed through my mind. Thinking about my promise to Aidlyn, my knuckles went white on the axe shaft and my blood pumped in skipping, stumbling beats, piping adrenaline to fuel that survival impulse part of the brain. I was ready to fight whatever came out of those shadows. In my head I practiced swinging the axe into the wolf's skull. I tried to slow my breathing. Without focus I would miss and then it would all be over and I would break my promise.

"Please, God."

THUMPA THUMP! THUMPA THUMP!

SHVESH!

THUMPA thump,

thumpa thump,

thumpa...

Fun fact: Scotland's wolves were hunted to extinction via order of King James VI in 1577. The Highlands remain, however, home to just an obscene number of mountain goats. Two of them leapt over the trail in front of me like some sort of insomniac's sleep therapy. At the time, I didn't know that there weren't any wolves on the West Highland Way. I did, however, learn that it was home to at least one jackass.

—

"Coffee, please. Black." My voice had the sickness I'd been walking deeper into sticking to its walls.

The bartender was the only person I'd seen since arriving on the vast isolated lodge estate. At the front, the concierge was vacant and there were no guests milling about in the halls or in the bar. As I waited for coffee, I expected to see a little kid peddle by on a red tricycle or a woman in a bloody wedding gown or something. It was that kind of place; grand and haunting. The warmness inside was still better than the gloom expanding both in the weather outside and in my soul while standing in it. The distance had been a bit shorter today but the terrain was brutal and the sun came and went in six short hours and even when it was up the rain clouds shut most of it out and the wind kept driving and driving deeper, never letting up long enough to let me defrost. I didn't even want to think about what my feet must have looked like in those wet squelching socks.

A fancy platter of coffee accoutrements arrived at my booth and I sipped with shivering joy and composed two more letters. I got to read the letter Aidlyn had left for me too. It began like this:

My dear, you are on my mind. In the past I have never understood people when they have talked about missing people. I get it now. I can feel it.

I miss you.

I loved her so much.

The letter went on to talk about the time that she and her sister were having in London and the tattoo she'd got on her back. She attached a picture of that. Three birds flying away up her shoulder. There was also a picture of her and Skyla looking into the camera and frowning with the caption, "We wish you were here!"

So did I.

I wrote her a reply detailing my encounter with the "wolf" and my mishap trying to cook rice over some tea light candles since I didn't have any gas. I burned the camping pot that I had borrowed from K group leader Paul. At least I'd have something to talk about next meeting. When I'd sent that, and another short and sweet message to my parents, I finished the pot of coffee in front of me. All of it. Then I emptied the creamer into my cup and finished that. Then I poured the sugar packets into my mouth. I was so hungry. My diet of one piece of flatbread and some ginger cookies wasn't replenishing however many calories you burn hiking through Scottish wild lands on the bonnie bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond. If I didn't find a way to cook my rice and meat soon, I knew I would be in trouble. But that was future Daniel's problem. Present Daniel, having likely overstayed his one pound welcome, left the fancy lodge estate and shimmied precariously across the waterfall rope bridge, crossing it more by memory than by the failing light.

In a shocking turn of events it was raining outside.

I'd set up my bivvy sack under a tree up on a promontory of rock so it was ready for me there in the dark.

"You can do this," I muttered to myself between coughing fits as I turned in my damp sleeping bag. And I could. I would have to. If I didn't... well I tried not to think too hard about it.

Hermit

Shivers vibrated the marrow in my bones like guitar strings playing a song called "Hypothermia"

"Here we go a-geh-en

my my

wish I could cook my foo-ood"

As I walked that day, I muttered to myself, "Idiot," and to God, "Please," and to Aidlyn, "I miss you I miss you I miss you." The sniffling mucus and hacking coughs and empty stomach and wobbly steps sank into the mud like,

sluck sluck

or, worse, and more frequently now that the cloud cover and altitude was allowing for it, the,

crunch crunch

of my soggy boots in fresh snow. And all the while the wind went straight through me and my wet clothes and as I stumbled dizzy down to the river to lap up some water, I broke down with the first spears of real panic. I admitted to myself that I had bit off more than I could chew. I didn't want to play anymore. I wanted to give up. Screw the beautiful mountains and the goats and the fleeting bits of happiness. I wanted my rocket ship.

That's when I saw the cabin.

It was the undeserved miracle of a guy who was only getting what he had signed up for. Inside I found a dry floor in a stone room with a fireplace and, for some reason, a ratty old couch. It wasn't warm. But it was something. A lucky break.

I looked at the map on my iPad and estimated that, without my bag weighing me down, I could make it to the next town to get food and send letters and maybe find a way back to Glasgow for the following day. I left everything behind apart from the tablet and stumbled reluctantly back out into the wet. Then I walked.

Through the rain.

Through the snow.

Through the mud.

With each quarter mark that I watched my watch's minute hand pass, I was sure the town was just around the corner. It took me over an hour to realize it was a lot farther than it had looked on the map. Hours farther.

Eventually, in pitch black, I had no choice but to retrace my steps in desultory fumbling darkness. I collapsed as a puddle of a boy back on the dusty slab floor and allowed the suppressed panic to break through like a burst dam. I screamed, like screaming into the welding mask, but in my lonely cabin where no one could hear me. There was no self pity this time. No girl to blame. No knife in my back. No great injustice. I'd done a stupid thing and I was too far from anywhere and I had no food and I was sick and cold and I was, for the first time, confronted with the stark reality that I was a collection of fragile skin and tissue that could and would deflate when the bits inside failed.

I had no food.

No money no medicine.

I couldn't turn tail and go home because my ticket out of Scotland was on a bus that wouldn't leave for another eight days. I didn't know if I could make it to the next town. I didn't know if I would ever see my parents again.

I could die.

That thought sunk like an anchor tied to my leg and down down into the bad, hopeless feeling I went. I couldn't even cry. I just sat there so cold with arms around my knees and stared straight ahead and thought about it.

I could die.

I could, no joke, no sarcasm, no crazy adventure hyperbole, die. As in forever. As in end of the road. I was not free and invincible. I wasn't proving anything to anyone. I could die.

I opened my iPad to write Aidlyn a letter that I knew I wouldn't be able to send that night. A letter I might not ever be able to send, which was why I figured I'd better do it. Maybe if they found me wet and covered in vomit, starved to death in that shack, they would find the iPad and the letter and she could read it and know that I was so so sorry. I went to the notes application to type up my message and was greeted by the last thing saved on the device:

I thought that maybe by now the butterflies would all be dead,

but alas, you have made them fly again... and again and again.

She'd left it there for me.

If a rocket to Mars landed outside of the cabin right then to take me away, and if on Mars I would suddenly not be sick anymore and would have food and be warm and no thing in my head, I wouldn't have gone. I wouldn't have gotten on that rocket because, reading that message, I knew it would be worth whatever misery I would have to drag myself through to get back to the girl who had written it.

Because I loved her.

So I did write her a letter. But not a goodbye letter. It was time to summon up that writer's spirit once again and use it to fix the gap. A literal one this time. Sitting on the improbable couch in that cabin in the middle of no place, I wrote up my plan to survive. I signed off in this way:

I've never missed anyone like I miss you now. You're right. People need people. I need you. I'll see you soon. Promise.

Love, Daniel

What I needed immediately was warmth and food. I had a fire pit and a forest full of sticks so soggy you could wring them out. So... fifty percent of the materials I would need for a fire anyway. Somewhere, surely, I could find something that would burn. I began tearing the cabin apart, looking for anything loose and flammable. Turning the place upside down I came up with nothing but a single dry board.

The last dry wood in Scotland.

I knew I had to get the next part right. I created a little flame nest in the fireplace with the rest of my half amp toilet paper. On the grate over this I placed my rice and meat in a pot for cooking.

Then I pulled out my lighter.

Not the empty silver rectangle that was now with Aidlyn, but a cheap cigarette lighter I had "borrowed" from a roommate. My heart sank as I held the plastic thing up to the moonlight through the window and saw the shadow of the last drops of fluid sloshing pitifully at the bottom. Regardless, I had to try. I took one of the remaining tea light candles from my bag and held it close to the unlikely sparker.

shick...

shick...

Nothing.

shick...

shick, shick...

shick...

shick,

shick

The tiny flame appeared like a vision of Heaven. I lit the candle and then shepherded it to the kindling. The candle lit the paper lit the board licked the bottom of the pot, like a pyromaniac's Rube Goldberg machine.

I saw steam.

I saw bubbles.

Things were being cooked.

I took off my socks and let my wrinkled trench feet soak up the smoke. I wasn't going to die. Not that night anyway.

The fire survived long enough for my dinner to cook and then to heat up instant coffee (black) in the empty tin can sat over the embers.

"EAT IT, SCOTLAND!" I yelled out at the soggy nation as I chewed my rice.

I slept that night curled up on the moldy couch with a warm meal in my stomach and listened to the Winnie the Pooh soundtrack projected from my iPad.

Yeah, I know.

I listened to Winnie the Pooh sing to Christopher Robin that forever wasn't long at all as long as they were together. I hugged myself and wished harder than anything that I could just be back be back with her. To be with her and stay this time. To stay anywhere. I fell asleep, breathing the words repeated over and over in my head:

I love her, I love her, I love her...

The Escape

Waking up was a good start.

Gooder still was the fact that waking up came with knowing that I had been asleep, which was more than I had really achieved any of the nights prior. The world outside was still wet. I was still a rag soaked up with West Highland dishwater. The thing in my head had been right this time in making me think that things were bad. Things were pretty bad. But it was wrong in making me think that they wouldn't get better.

I was back in the garbage bag saddle with Clive on my back and grit between my molars and four words captured and looped in my gelatin emulsion brain.

because I love you.

My last legs got me through the marshy trail to where the lake's beginning became the river's end. This was where the town was supposed to be, according to the map. And it was. The town was right there. There were buildings and a chimney smoking lodge and a highway leading back down to Glasgow. From Glasgow to London. From London to Aidlyn. That's as far as I ever needed any road to take me. Day saved.

There was, however, one setback.

The town was on the other side of the river.

There were a few wooden buildings on my side of the water, just past a low wire fence that I scrambled over. I knew before I knocked on the door that there was no one there. From the signage scattered around the place I gathered that this was a campground facility for West Highland hikers. It was, as I had become acutely aware, not exactly peak season. Everything was bolted shut. I know because I tried all of the windows and doors. All of them. There wasn't anything much of use lying around. Like a warm blanket would have been nice. Or a boat. Or a Denny's. Oh, man, Denny's. But there was no blanket, boat, or breakfast buffet. What there was, I discovered after thorough investigation, was a sign.

It said this:

Bridge closes at _ p.m

Bridge!

... CLOSES!?

After some frantic bog hopping through the flooded pasture, I could see the bridge down the river and the metal grating in front of it with an elaborate revolving door turnstile setup. If someone would go through the process of setting up a contraption like that, it seemed unlikely that they would leave it unlocked while their property was abandoned. As I approached, I began devising a plan to use my belt as a sort of grappling hook to climb up and over the barricade. Or maybe, if I warmed my fingers up enough, I could get around from the side and shimmy along while hanging onto the wooden boards. I could stand on one side and scream for help to anyone who might happen by, or maybe I could set the property on fire and then—

The grate gave when I tried it and I walked through. That bridge could just consider itself lucky it didn't mess with Daniel Foutz that day.

—

I pushed through the bucolic entry of the Drover's Inn and sidled in stiff wobbled lurches to a warm place by the inglenook, dropping the world's weariest bag to the ground like a sack of spuds that would have been thrown out in the potato famine.

"Coffee. Black," I said to the bartender. All gravelly, y'know, like I was Mad Max or Snake Pliskin, or something cool instead of a muddy teenager with a runny nose and a whooping cough and an ice axe sticking out of his garbage bag.

The other bar patrons looked around me, avoiding eye contact like you do to that guy on the street corner chewing his lower lip and scratching invisible bugs off of his elbows, wanting to tell you about how Obama is the king of the lizard people.

"You got it," said the bartender, breaking a smile. "You just get yourself warm, okay?"

"Okay."

I could have cried. Obviously. "Is there a bus that goes by here?" I asked when he returned with coffee.

"Where you headed?"

"Glasgow."

He smiled. I realize now that he smiled because I didn't know how to pronounce the city's name.

"Might want to order some food. It'll be a few hours."

Thank you, God.

—

"You can't do that, sir. Excuse me? Sir."

I looked up to see the blurry figure of a bus station employee standing over me with hands on her hips.

"We can't let you sleep in here. You either need to sit up or go outside"

"Oh. Okay." I sat up. "Sorry." Outside was a place I was okay with never seeing again.

It was evening in Glasgow. I was still damp but I wasn't dead and I wasn't on the West Highland Way, so, y'know, score.

I checked my iPad again. No wifi. I'd been able to talk to Aidlyn for a short while back at the bar. She was overwhelmingly relieved to hear from me after not getting a letter the night before. She told me that she and her family were still in London for the next few days, which was the greatest possible thing that she could have told me, only before I could scramble to make plans to meet her, the one bus back to Glasgow pulled up outside the Drover's Inn and I'd had to run to catch it, leaving her to wonder where in the world I was and where I was going.

That's how I came to be asleep in my damp bag in a bathroom stall in the Glasgow bus station. I figured I wouldn't be told not to sleep in a bathroom stall.

knock! knock! knock!

"Sir, the bus station is closing. You need to come out."

Closing? The bus station is closing? But my bus doesn't get here for another...

Six hours.

My bus was six hours away, it was the middle of the night, and I was being evicted from a toilet. It was up there for my top three most humbling moments in a bathroom stall, that's for sure. I was a dirty kid dragging a sleeping bag out of a bathroom with toilet paper sticking out of his shoes. (Improvised socks, you see, on account of my feet looking like the Swamp Thing and needing to be wrapped in something dry.) Stepping back out into the night wind was like having your gym spotter lift the barbell out of your hands just to drop it on your neck. I don't know what business I have making weight lifting similes but just give me this; it was a dark moment.

I did the only thing I then had recourse to do, which was to find a bench, wrap myself in my sleeping bag, and try not to think about how cold I was. I tried pretended that the shivering was like being in a massage chair, only instead of muscle relaxation, the chair's purpose was to shake you full of sadness.

So much for imagination.

I pulled out my iPad to set an alarm and discovered that I was picking up wireless internet from one of the parked buses. Before it could take off I quickly wrote:

Aidlyn ill be in London tomorrow night. If you get thin meth me at to Starbucks outside the tramp station where we waited for David and Kats. I lube you so moan

In my rush, I may have failed to check for autocorrect errors. The bus left before I could amend the mess of a message. All I could do was pull the cold sleeping bag against my cold jacket against my cold skin and hope that she would see it and understand and that, at the end of all of the shivering, there'd finally be warm again.

In The Family

I didn't realize what day it was.

Not until I overheard a Filipino couple in the Starbucks booth next to me mention the fact.

"Maligayang Pasko po," I said to them in Tagalog as they got up to leave.

The guy smiled a surprised smile and said, "Merry Christmas to you too, man."

I was alone, disheveled and dirty in my wet jacket, feet wrapped in toilet paper and muddy hiking boots in a soon closing Starbucks on Christmas Eve. Aidlyn must not have gotten my message.

With a long slurpy pull on the straw, I reached the bottom of my drink, and with it, the bottom of my wallet. It was too late to try and find a hostel. Not that I had a way to pay for one anyway. I wondered if there were warm places open twenty four hours in the city. A church? Maybe I could go to one of the parks and find a place out of the wind or something. Somehow I had to last another five days until I could meet the bus that I would have taken from the end of the West Highland Way. Five days with no money in central London. I might have done better to stay on the moldy couch cabin in Scotland.

I looked up from my empty cup and out through the fogged up glass of the café Christmas window. A figure was frozen still on the other side. She stepped forward and stretched out a hand, spreading apart fingers on the glass. Those resolute blue eyes met mine. She burst through the door and I knocked over my chair standing up as she catapulted into my arms and her head was buried in my shoulder and mine was crooked down on her hair and I held on to her and I'm sure squeezed Scottish rain out into her sweater and choked her a bit with the smell of goats and mud and when we pulled away a little so she could look up at me I began to apologize for this but she stopped me.

"I thought you were dead." The glistening quiver in her eyes told me that she meant it.

"So did I." I took Aidlyn's hand and examined her fingers, spreading them out and touching them.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm just making sure you're real."

A man and woman who I assumed were Aidlyn's parents stood with Skyla by the Starbucks entrance. What do you say to your girlfriend's parents when they walk in on their precious little girl in the arms of a wet hobo?

"Merry Christmas?"

"You look cold," said Aidlyn's dad.

"Cold? No, well, I mean, I don't really know anymore. I've been wet for so long. I'm not in Scotland so things could be worse. A lot could be worse."

"Is that toilet paper sticking up out of your shoes?" asked Skyla.

"Uh, yeah. My socks were um..."

"Wet?"

"Yes."

"What happened?"

"It's a... it's a story."

"Well," said Aidlyn's mom. "Let's get you home and you can tell it to us."

So we did.

We went home.

We went home to a little apartment in the heart of London and there was a washing machine and a heater and food and I was sitting on a couch in a living room with a cup of tea under a blanket, holding Aidlyn's hand watching Pirates of the Caribbean with a family on Christmas Eve. I wasn't dying or starving or wet. I was home.

I lost a lot of hands of Mennonite card games and the parents went off to bed and I sat and listened to Aidlyn and her sister talk about sister things until I could no longer hold open my eyelids. I slipped off to go to sleep in a real, honest bed in a separate room. I often don't sleep in beds. It comes from a childhood thing where I became an expert at crib escape due to my hatred for being stuck in one place. But not that night. I could've stayed there forever. I slipped under the covers and closed my eyes to drift off to perfect, unassailable sleep.

knock knock

In a moment I shrugged off fatigue like it was a sweater and said, "Come in."

The difference between a Bible school couple and a "normal" couple is that I put on a shirt before pulling her down to the mattress to kiss her. That and that the climax of the encounter was the two of us holding hands and praying together. I ran my fingers through her hair, just looking into those eyes I'd seen so clearly in my head through all the misery of the days before. Both of us were fully clothed but I was more exposed than I've ever been with anyone.

She kissed me softly once more and said again, "I missed you so much."

"Do you still have the lighter?" I asked.

"Yes." She leaned over and whispered up close, "But do you really want it back?"

I smiled. "Not at all."

She touched a finger to her nose. "Thanks for not dying." Then she went off to her separate bed in a separate room.

Best abstinence I've ever had.

If I were writing this story as a Hallmark movie script, then it would end right here. Wouldn't that have been nice? A catchy Christmas jingle and names in the credits with little candy canes and you could walk away assuming that everything after lying on that warm bed with her worked out perfect. You and I could watch that movie again and again and every time it would work out great and we could believe when it was over, and the nice Christmas jingle played with the candy cane names, that being in love really is the greatest thing in the world. That its worth fighting and suffering for because, in the end, it's bound to work out. As long as you really love each other.

But movies can only be happy because they finish before you get to the end of the story. For one more second, though, my life was perfect. For a second there, paused on my West Highland Way life, the rain stopped and the sun came out and I could look and appreciate just how beautiful it all was. For a second I could do what humans are best at and pretend like tomorrow would never come and that dwindling flames could keep me warm forever.

The Movement of Stars

The return to Constance Haus after my Hallmark Christmas was a pachinko descent into further chaos.

I borrowed money from Aidlyn before she and her family left for Prague, so I was able to afford to board myself in a cozy rat's nest hovel of a bunkhouse sheltered away in the upper levels of a football pub in West Ham. I fell asleep each night to the mumbled breaths of the Arabic man spilled over the bunk bed above mine. I spent my day scrounging meals from whatever scattered travelers had left behind in the hostel kitchen. Like wheat Bix crumbs rolled in peanut butter. I developed a very specific set of culinary skills.

I was whittling away the time before my bus would roll into its London stop to carry me on with my original itinerary through the Chunnel under and across to France. From there I would continue merrily on to Amsterdam. Amsterdam was as far as my return plan went, but I'd bought myself some time to figure things out anyway.

For a few days, I had London to myself. I took misty pilgrimages along the Thames, passing the reconstructed Shakespearean Globe and trodding under the lie of London bridge. Everything was beautiful. Even the ugly things, like the sticky alleys and littered tube stations, had an undeniable charm to them. Everywhere there was history around you and trains under and street singers and magicians and peddlers of cheap chachkies vying for their shards of foot traffic spotlight.

I bought a ticket to an Irish musical called Once. While waiting for the showtime I poked my nose into a dusty bookshop. Books before the show. Just like back in Manila at the mall across the street from Paradiso. I read the first few chapters of A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. It's about a group of people who meet on the roof of this building on New Year's Eve, each one having come there to commit suicide. Instead of offing themselves, though, they form a sort of Breakfast Clubian relationship. They wind up having regular meetings to discuss life and decide whether or not it was worth sticking around for.

The play was lovely, though I caught a few glares for taking it in with my nasty black jacket and still rank hiking boots on. Everyone else was fancied up in sheaths and lace and heels and fitted coats.

—

I left London and arrived a pauper once more, only in the streets of Amsterdam instead of Glasgow. I didn't have a Way to follow for direction this time, though. Embarrassed to have asked for too much money from Aidlyn, I'd run myself broke back in Britain and so I found myself asleep on a bench in the street. The next morning was New Year's Eve. I pilfered some internet from a Chinese restaurant and sent an SOS out to Haus students traveling in the city. I was rescued later by some friends who snuck me into their Airbnb lodgings while the homeowners were away at a New Year's party.

Amsterdam wages war against the night sky on New Year's Eve. The darkness gets erased with fantastic expulsions of color and sound. Watching them through the glass, I called Aidlyn in Prague and we talked through the exploding world. I didn't want to jump off a building like those people in that book. I just wanted to stay with her.

A debtor to another friend, the next day, I said more goodbyes and left for the cheaper hamlet of Rotterdam, where I holed up in a room of forty other men and bid a few days away wandering more foreign brick until it was close enough to school's reignition that I could sail the autobahn down to the bottom of Germany on a daisy chain of buses and train cars. I crossed the globe painted driveway with its shining cross and pushed through those double doors. I dropped my bag. I took a breath and thought, I'm home. Which was an odd sensation really, for a guy who wasn't from anywhere in particular. It was the nice kind of odd though, like a Douglas Adams book or drunk Santas rioting at Buckingham Palace.

—

Aidlyn led me off into the dark unknown.

"Are we going to an inside somewhere?" I asked as we sidewalked together. "It's very cold."

"You would be warmer if you—"

ziiiiiiiiip

"Oh good," she said, "I've trained you well."

"Yeah, well, Scotland happened the last time I ignored your advice."

She smiled smugly. "In here."

She led us into a posh hotel down by the lakeside. Entering the building, she took my hand and laughed like I had just said something funny.

"That was a lovely walk, dear. This really is a nice little town. Would you like to go back to our room?"

"Yes, darling, I think so," I said, waving to the concierge.

No one in the hotel batted an eye as we mounted the stairs to the top floor. What we said actually wasn't important. Speaking in English just made it seem obvious that we were tourists who would be staying at the hotel. Upstairs she and I found a spot by a window peering up out of the roof and we sat down on the carpeted hallway where we could watch the stars move slowly through the sky.

"Hey, Daniel?" she said after a while.

"Mm?"

"I think I'm in love with you."

I touched a finger to my nose and then said, "I love you too."

And I really really did.

Fade From My Light

"We have to break up, don't we?"

I didn't know this like I'd gotten a postcard saying as much with some kind of Jesus signature on it. I didn't know like you know something when your parents tell you to your face that they really wish you hadn't dropped out of college. I knew more like you know that mayonnaise wouldn't work on a pizza without needing to try it, or like you know that planes are safer to travel in than cars but your blood pressure still goes up every time you take off into the sky and yet not when you pull out of your driveway.

It was a feeling.

A hunch, I guess, would be a more accurate way to say it. I had a hunch that God was telling me to break up with Aidlyn. A hunch wasn't enough for me to walk up to her and tell her that we were finished but after four months of Bible school and reading about people ignoring God and getting boils and bug infestations or being turned into pillars of salt, I wasn't going to just shove the feeling down either. So I asked Aidlyn if she wanted to take a walk on the beach. She nodded knowingly and we went down to the water with the sleeping swans and night fog rolling out into grey obscurity.

"We have to break up, don't we?" She said it while I was still counting up my breaths. It was one thing for me to have some hunch about advice from God and another entirely for her to have independently landed on the same conclusion.

"I think so," I said.

"Because I'm probably supposed to go back and live in Manitoba," she said. "Because my future in the whole Yeshua scheme of things probably has something to do with Mennonites."

"And mine probably doesn't."

"Yeah."

Right then the fog was blown back just enough by the changing wind that we could see the city lights in Switzerland. That was Aidlyn's future.

"So what are you gonna do?" she asked.

"I have no idea." My future was the mountains. They were still just hazy shadows with a red light blinking from Ebenalp.

"What do you want to do?"

It was an excellent question. I didn't have an excellent answer. At least I didn't feel like I did. I had an answer, though, so I offered that to her.

"I want to tell stories," I said.

"You could tell stories in Manitoba. I mean, there aren't as many people around to listen to them..."

"I know. But I just... I have this feeling."

"Yeah. I have a feeling too."

"Pastors and teachers and stuff always talk about looking for direction from God and stuff, y'know? But I think that's kind of a bunch of crap. I mean, I guess some people get handed directions, like Noah's blueprints for the ark or my parents feeling 'called' to the mission field. But maybe God's not so much about telling us what we should be doing as just letting us know when we're doing something we shouldn't be."

"Yeah, maybe."

"I don't know," I said. "I just don't know. About anything. But maybe if you and I are both thinking these things and I don't know this much then... y'know. We should wait. At least. See what happens at the end of school."

"Okay."

"Okay." She took my hand and drew little circles with her thumb.

"This is gonna suck."

"Yup," she said. "It will."

We both laughed a little bit then, because it all seemed sort of ridiculous. She watched her Swiss lights and I watched my blinking dot and I tried not to think too hard about what was happening. It didn't really feel like we were breaking up. It definitely didn't feel like the night I found out about the Lie or the day with the rainy sneakers. I still kind of felt like things were going to continue on to happily ever after. Maybe I figured this was like God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son and then stopping him last minute to tell him he did a good job at proving his faithfulness. Somewhere in my heart, I still figured that Aidlyn was up there somehow with that blinking metaphor dot of a future. Maybe not right that moment, but eventually. I loved her so much. She loved me. Something would work out.

"So how do we do this... exactly?" she asked.

"Well, I do have one idea..."

We skipped lectures and went to our place by the river under the bridge where, "because I love you" was scrawled out in two different inks, separated by a stream that was just a little too far to jump across. Standing close like the penguins in the mural, we touched our foreheads together.

"You look like a bug from this close," she breathed, removing my glasses.

For a while we didn't move. We just stood there and listened to cars roll overhead and the water roll underfoot and the world roll around the universe, seemingly always in the wrong direction.

"I can't imagine ever loving anyone like I love you."

"Maybe you won't." Her smile opened up a warm breath that curled against my face. "Sorry, that was probably mean."

"Yes. But also accurate."

Our faces inclined the last degrees for our noses to touch as if saying a final ginau. We kissed for the last time, for a long time. There was no sound of rolling cars or current or global circumambulation. There's little point describing it because I could never make you feel it all the way. The best I can do is to ask you what the best you've ever felt was. Think about that and then put that feeling in the bodies of two tragic virgins kissing under a bridge and you can insert your favorite romantic melancholy song in the background and sit with a nice quilt wrapped around you by the heating vent while the snow piles up out the window. It was like that.

God knows I'm not skilled at kissing women. I feel I should mention that. I've had very little practice and anything to do with my tongue tends to wind up a bit wrong. Maybe the imperfection of that is the detail that sealed it all as the last perfect moment. Because it end, eventually. Not so much because either of us really wanted the kissing to stop but more like how you hand the bag of M&Ms to your friend so that you won't keep reaching your hand in for more. That night I could've eaten every M&M on the planet. But you just can't stretch things on forever, no matter how much you perfect your tongue maneuvering. A sentence keeps going and going and going but it's not a sentence, really, until you put a period at the end of it. That's how you look back and say, "That happened." So the kissing stopped with us both holding each other's shoulders at a distance and our eyes doing the talking asking each other, "Are you going to be okay?"

"Okay. So I guess we're broken up now," I said. It was Shakespearean really.

"That was fun," she said on the sidewalk back. She said it with a smile I didn't understand.

I did later that week though.

When we got back together.

I know, I know.

I wound up telling God that if He really wasn't cool with Aidlyn-and-I, then He would have to make it a whole lot clearer than a hunch.

How could something so right possibly be the wrong thing?

When You Left the Fire

"I don't know if I get Jesus."

She looked up at me from behind her Bible. She sat across the little tea room table from me with the French press wisping up steam between us.

"What do you mean you don't get Jesus? Er, Yeshua."

"No, Yeshua I feel like I understand."

"They're the same person, Ads."

"Yeah... I guess so." She took the French press up in her hands and poured another cup. "Want more?"

"Probably. Look, Aidlyn, do you have a question about Jesus? I mean, I'm not an expert but—"

She held up a hand and took a long sip of coffee. I was left with my mouth open and hands out gesturing, waiting for her to swallow and say, "Forget it."

"This is important."

She sighed. "I knew you were gonna be like this."

"Like what?"

"All freaked out because you're worried I'll go to hell."

"What are you talking about? Of course I don't think you'll go to hell. Just— what's wrong?"

"I just... I'm not sure if I believe in Jesus in the way the Bible talks about him. See!" She jammed a finger at my face. "I told you. I knew you would act like this."

"Aidlyn."

"Daniel." She said mocking my serious tone.

"Stop."

I didn't want to play her games right then. It did freak me out. This was the girl I wanted to live in a little house with. A house that was intentionally smaller than what we could afford so we could give more money to orphans, and she would be a successful master's degree keynote speaker with a Mennonite peace organization or something and she would advocate for change and love and making the world a better place with her firm, don't-mess-with-me eyes, and she would wear super classy pantsuits and I would be frazzle-haired at home with our goofy kids and coffee always made and I'd split my time between taking care of the little monsters and writing my next book and she'd come home and I'd tell her how impressed I never ceased to be with her and she'd tell me how sensitive and sexy my writing was and we would take trips to countries that most families didn't take trips to like Ghayana or Tunisia, and every five years on our honeymoon we would go back to that phone booth in London and kiss again and everything would be so perfect, damnit.

None of that could work if she didn't believe in Jesus. Because if she didn't, than would I be able to? I'd come so far from my, "not really sure if I believe this anymore" to, "I'm almost definitely sure I believe this" but that was because she had been right there with me and the two of us had been praying and doing the whole figuring out faith thing together and she taught me how to love and I quit porn because of her and I figured that had to be because God was real and making stuff happen through our relationship and I thought it all meant something. But all of the sudden she didn't know. All of the sudden she wasn't an exclamation point anymore. She was just a question mark like me and Max and everyone else.

She sat, happy, drinking her coffee and browsing the Bible while she waited for me to structure what I was going to say next. I could have left it, but I was so worried. I didn't know if God would send her to hell if she didn't "get" Jesus. I didn't know if this was something that would blow over. If it could have been just a typical Aidlyn running in the face of authority moment or if in a week she'd come to her own epiphany and tell me about it and everything would be fine. I could have let it go.

But I didn't.

"Please, can you tell me what is it that you don't understand? Do you believe Jesus died for your sins? Or Yeshua or whatever name we're using now."

"Again, like, I'm not sure know what that means," she said casually. "But in my mind Yeshua is this different idea than the Jesus we talk about in school. Yeshua says things like how the greatest commandment is to love and that he didn't come to judge people and he goes around healing sick people and hugging prostitutes and stuff. He's this peace and love hippie dude. I think that's wonderful. I like talking to that idea of God and I feel like I'm talking to someone when I pray to him.

"But I don't get where the whole blood of Christ stuff comes in. Why do people want to talk about Jesus' blood so much? And hell and damnation and satan and demons... I don't get that. I'm not into it. It's not really what we did back at my church. I can't imagine this peaceful Yeshua as the same person as the bloody turn-or-burn Jesus or the Old Testament God who sends down plagues and kills people just because they don't understand."

Neither do I.

That's what I thought in my head. I couldn't say that because what if then we both just said ginau and we went off the rails and plummeted into existential crisis and both of us burnt in hell for it. Maybe. I didn't know. I didn't know but that didn't stop me from trying to explain it all.

"It's like..." I took a deep breath. "So God makes the world, right?

"We're gonna be here for a while."

"Just, please give me a second here. God makes the world—"

"Should I make more coffee?"

"—and then He makes people," I pushed through. "But God wants people to be capable of love, which means that we have to be able to choose something other than love. He tells them, 'You can do anything you want, just don't eat the fruit from this tree.' But they eat from the tree. Let's represent sin as rain. Now that these two have eaten the fruit, it's raining constantly all over the world. Every person born after that sins, so like, they walk out into the rain. The problem with this is that Heaven and God are perfect. They're totally dry. It's like when you were a kid and you had to dry off before coming through the door because wet stuff doesn't belong inside the house. We separated ourselves from God by choosing to go out into the rain and the problem is that we can't dry ourselves, because our whole world is wet and slowly drowning.

"So God could have given up on us, but instead He says, 'Okay, is anyone down there still trying to be dry?' And there's this guy named Noah who is trying really hard to stay dry, even though everyone around him is partying in the rain. Because Noah wants to to go inside with his dad. So God keeps track of Noah and his family and anyone else for the next few thousand years who tries to be dry, and He promises that one day He'll go out and make them dry so they can be inside with Him.

"Then God comes to earth as a human. As Yeshua or Jesus, and goes around without once letting himself get wet. And it sucks for Him because it's so hard to get around and do stuff without getting wet and all the wet people make fun of Him and try to pull him into the rain because they're embarrassed that this person is proving that you can stay dry and that we all actually just suck at it. He lives his entire life without once getting wet until finally a bunch of wet people decide to kill Him because they're so mad.

"Then Jesus dies and goes to the place where people who are wet go. We'll call it the ocean in this analogy. But then there's this paradox because not even the ocean can get Jesus wet. He's so dry that He just walks around on top of the water and doesn't sink. So Jesus walks right out of hell because He won and it can't do anything to Him and he goes back to earth and tells everyone that He's going inside to get a bunch of umbrellas and if anyone wants to come inside, all they have to do is take an umbrella from Him and then He'll dry them off.

"Freedom is the ability to choose to go to Hell," I said. "Love is the fact that no one has to. Anyone who wants an umbrella just has to grab one. That's the blood of Christ. It's an umbrella. It's the way to get dry. To get warm."

I sat across from her and watched as she finished her last sip of coffee and turned a sentence around in her head, eyes out the window somewhere just above the sinking sun.

"You seem to really understand this," she said eventually. "I'm happy about that. Really. But I still don't understand. Could you please appreciate that?"

"What doesn't make sense?" I asked with the worry clear in my voice. "God loved everyone so much that He died to save us and—"

Then she giggled.

"Sorry," she said, amused. "Please continue."

She laughed at me. This wasn't a joke to me, it was serious. It was the most serious thing, and I was trying so hard and she was just treating me like a little kid.

So I got mad.

I yelled.

It was so loud in that tiny space.

I yelled and it made Aidlyn leap up out of her chair and back against the wall. "Daniel, are you okay?" she asked with this scared voice.

All of my collected frustration came bubbling to the surface in that one hot moment. I ripped off my sneaker and threw it at a cabinet and then punched and punched and punched the wall like,

SHUNK! SHUNK! SHUNK!

I was a lighter that had been sparking for so long without fuel to catch fire. Aidlyn was pressed up in the corner, horrified and worried and about to break into tears, and I had this hating angry look on my face and I just left her there.

Let me ask you something. If you could take back one moment in your life, what would it be? What's the worst thing you've ever done? In a life rife with poor decisions, I could pick mine out in a second. I think about it all the time.

With one shoe on and a sock sponging up wet pavement outside, I walked down to the bridge. There was a branch on the ground and I hefted it up and slammed it against the wall like some sort of animal rattling its cage. The force of doing it stung my hands and shook my skeleton under paper skin and suddenly the anger shook off and the realization of everything that had just so suddenly happened poured out on top of me. It hurt so much. It hurt so much and I fumbled for a way to push out the hurt so I heaved in a breath and screamed,

"PLEEEEEAAAAASE!"

PLEASE!

please!

please....

Like a fading memory. I slumped down against the wall where the only person to ever say she loved me wrote the fact down. My chest heaved up in sobs and everything was blurry and I was so sorry. I wanted to wake up again and get my one Groundhog Day repeat of that afternoon. The scream crawls back down my throat. The sneaker flies onto my foot. I say, "Okay," and have another cup of coffee. So simple. But the world kept turning. It always does. I thought of Christmas songs and candy canes and sat and cried for my perfect life that I felt could never be so again.

—

She was in the prayer room, head collapsed into her knees. I'd never seen her like she was there on the carpet. A pierced albatross. I summoned all I could to soothe out an apology. To click back time. But the words gave way to silence and I looked into her eyes and knew. She didn't see me with anger or sadness or passive aggression. What I saw staring out through resolute blue teary eyes was unrecognition. Like I had been replaced with a complete stranger.

"Aidlyn, I'm sorry. I just felt like you were making fun of me and..." I trailed off as she looked at me with all the power in those eyes drained and replaced by whatever feeling was in the words that were about to come out of her mouth.

"You were supposed to be safe." She said.

"I would never hurt you, Aidlyn."

She got up off the ground. She walked past me to the doorway, paused without turning, and whispered, "You already did."

Shadow Forgiveness

It was a while after the sneaker hit the cabinet.

Aidlyn and I met at the demilitarized zone of the prayer room again. We sat down, both more calm. I said as best I could how sorry I was for scaring her. I told her I would never do that again. I promised. We sat in hard backed chairs across a desk from each other and I watched her watching the window and waited for her to break my heart.

After the long silence she said, "Do you still want to be a team?"

"Of course I do," I said. "But..." I thought past the selfishness of my anger from the day before and the questions that Aidlyn was asking and realized that maybe some things were more important than me getting what I wanted. "I think we should probably wait until you've found some answers to your questions. Maybe this time we should really hold on until we know a few things. Does that make sense?"

She nodded.

I stretched out my hand and spread my fingers apart.

She pressed her hand up against mine.

Leaving the room though, I felt like things could be okay again.

I might have been right.

—

Max, Aidlyn, Rose, and I were all playing cards in the tea room, as we had dozens of times before. We heard the muffled voices downstairs saying it was time to go to bed. Max and Rose skipped off but Aidlyn and I kept sitting. After a moment she began to talk. She said some of the things we had been repeating endlessly since we had broken up (again). She said these words like, "how much I want to be with you" and, "just want to be a team again." And then one of our resident advisers poked her head in and told us to go to bed. So we stepped out into the darkened landing.

I had to go down and she had to go up. We stood there almost out of habit. Finding places to evade curfew for as long as possible was our favorite game. But now we were just staring at each other in the darkness. She took my hand. We hadn't done that since we broke up. Time stretched. We would get a lecture if we didn't move soon. People were scurrying past us in both directions to get to their rooms.

But we didn't.

She stepped closer. I wanted to put my arms around her. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to go back.

"I don't know," I whispered, "what I'm supposed to say here."

She squeezed my hand. There were tears in her eyes. Her lower lip quivered. The hero Aidlyn was gone. In her place was a girl. A girl I loved. A girl who stood there in the dark and said, "I love you," with a broken and shaking voice. She was as close as you can get and still look at someone without them becoming a buggy distortion.

I lube you so moan.

I could have said it. Everything could have been different.

But I didn't.

She stared up with an intake of breath and those resolute blue eyes quivering into mine. I blinked slowly. She let go of my hand. She turned and walked up the stairs. I turned and walked down.

Under my wrongly assembled duvet I saw the whole journey, from that voice in the garble noise back in a Jesus class around the world to running a box cutter across my chest in Toronto and the first night in Germany eating breakfast with a dozen giggling girls and my relationship with Aidlyn back from the conversation about Disney princesses. Words under a bridge and a telephone booth in London and my disastrous Scotland adventure lying on that couch with one less cushion, determined to make a way because I loved someone so much and someone finally loved me. I felt the pools in the corners of my eyes. How was I supposed to make it through another three months of sleeping one floor under her and teary eyes on dark stairways?

The thing was, I wouldn't have to.

If I'd known then what that would look like, I would have thrown off that improper blanket and run back up those stairs and knocked on her door and woken everybody up and I wouldn't have cared and I would have stood there in front of her in my boxer shorts and her with blurry sleep eyes. I would have told her that I loved her more than the world and myself and I would find a way to be a team again like finding the last dry wood in Scotland.

But you never know then what you know now.

And still, the world turned.

Disappearing

She wasn't at breakfast that morning.

Aidlyn missing breakfast wasn't atypical but I normally at least saw her come down in pajamas and messy hair to grab a banana or something before darting back out the door. I turned that thought around during our morning lectures.

"So tell me," said our guest speaker. "If you could live in a perfect paradise separated from all suffering without any consequences... would you abandon it for earth? And if so then why?" He paced as he handed the question out to us. "Why would God leave that behind for a world where he knew he would be crucified by the very people he came to save?"

I lost his words, my eyes fixed to the back of an empty chair. When we broke for coffee I went to check the coat rack. Aidlyn's jacket with all the pockets was missing. When she wasn't at lunch I asked Max if he knew where she was. He said she hadn't mentioned anything to him. When she wasn't at dinner I grabbed my own jacket and stole someone's umbrella from the basket at the door and stepped once more out onto the puddled cobble.

I went to the Catholic church and the beach and walked down the trails through the woods along the coast to our log looking out at Switzerland. I practically ran to the stream under the bridge, long abandoning any hope of getting back for evening lecture. She wasn't anywhere. I found myself familiarly sitting outside of the school in the rain, closed umbrella in hand, waiting to see her green hood bob into view over the wall. But it didn't. Gabriel came to lock the front doors.

"You alright, Dan?" he asked me as I passed him on my way back inside.

"Yeah. I'm okay."

Weaving through the crowd of faces all funneling to the stairs, I bumped into Aidlyn's roommate, Carrie.

"Hey, have you seen Aidlyn?"

"Yeah, she's in her room." There was something measured in the response that didn't resemble any of my previous interactions with Carrie. "I think she went to bed already though."

"Oh. That's fine. Just worried. Thanks."

"No problem."

She finally surfaced the next day at breakfast, but she darted out of the room before I could get to her. I was evaded similarly in my attempt to catch her before our speaker began the session as she slipped in just under the wire and then escaped upstairs to her room during the coffee break. It wasn't until lunch that I was able to get a word in, walking over to the crowded table she had joined and making an excuse to temporarily seat myself in a vacated chair.

"Hey, uh, so you disappeared yesterday."

"I went to Café Hoepker with Carrie," she said without making eye contact.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yup!" She held up two thumbs and then took a big bite of her grilled cheese sandwich.

"Oh. Okay. Cool."

The days following continued like this. At every turn Aidlyn was either absent or hurrying somewhere else or would give these three word responses and walk away. I took it as some sort of passive aggressive cold shoulder. Was this because I didn't tell her I loved her back? Was this because of the shoe? Maybe the break up made her look back and hate me for all of that stuff. I had to apologize. I had to make things better. I had to get my friend back.

I left letters in her mailbox and set little gifts out where I knew she'd run into them. I tried countless times to ask her if she'd just talk to me privately for a bit, but she always had an excuse ready. An excuse and a perfect poker face that wasn't trying to convince me that she really needed to be somewhere else but that also didn't let on to the emotion that prevented her from wanting to talk to me. And as the days became weeks, the letters remained in her mailbox, the gifts disappeared without event, and I began to wish that she did hate me. That would still be better than her just not caring anymore.

As the trend continued, it seemed more and more convincing to me that Aidlyn was just over everything that had happened between us. She had become this completely fine, self actuated super being to whom I was just another guy she happened to go to school with. She was so okay. She was so okay and meanwhile I was tearing apart at the seams, tortured by the relentless memory that my life was the best it had ever been when she and I were together. And somehow all of that had just been eternal sunshined right out of her spotless mind.

I became steadily more desperate. I was like this droopy relationship clown holding up a sign that said "Notice me!" in one hand and a wilted bouquet of flowers in the other. And I knew what I must have looked like from the outside. I knew that there was nothing attractive about this guy trying to flag down his ex girlfriend as she whizzed by on her well adjusted autobahn. I couldn't do anything else. I was undone and exhausted, a dog chasing a car and try as I could to imagine the scenario, I didn't know what I would say if I finally caught her. I didn't know what to do.

So I ran.

I ran farther than I had ever run before. I didn't think about turning around or how I would get back in time, I just kept running down the thin-wearing soles of my sneaks as I propelled myself out of Fishbach, out of Friedrichshafen, way the heck out along the edge of lake Constance toward Austria. I stopped when I was halfway out of Germany and sixteen miles from school. I wasn't tired. I mean maybe I was but I couldn't tell. The ache in my legs and the music in my ears were blocking out the other stuff. But I stopped because I came to a castle on the water. I walked up the steps out into the courtyard and ran my fingers along the old cracked stones and I traced over the purple ink A and D with an umbrella covering them, slowly fading from months of rain.

It was true. Nowhere was far enough. There were pieces of Aidlyn and I scattered in the wind across the world. All the unlocked doors and mountains and fog smeared lakes and phone booths and every single umbrella. I couldn't get away. And I didn't really want to. I wanted to want to. I wanted to want to let go and move on like she apparently had, but how could I?

I felt these cold pricks against my skin. Then quickly, as if from nowhere, all around me white balls of hail gathered on the ground, these frozen scintillas. It was so beautiful. As I crunched over them slowly down the road, the leaning sun slipped below the branches and just as soon as they had come I watched the ghost white blanket melt and seep down into the dirt and roots.

—

People were making plans to travel Europe and ski and go to concerts and castles and beaches again. I didn't have plans. There wasn't really anyone that I would have wanted to go anywhere with except the one person who was flying to Portugal to get away from me. My days by then were mostly me in a room by myself, or maybe with the Creator of the universe, depending on what the thing in my brain made me feel when I got out of bed. I argued and apologized and felt angry and guilty and entitled and like the world's toilet and simultaneously I felt awful for feeling awful when I was living in Europe on someone else's money while the planet was filled with people who had real tragedies to be miserable about.

But I don't know.

I can't think of a whole lot of things that I wouldn't rather go through than feeling erased from the mind of someone who used to love you. Someone who you still love.

On my way out the door for another angst walk in the rain, I heard a familiar throat clearing. She was there in her green jacket and sneaks. She wasn't smiling or frowning or anything, just standing there. Just existing.

"Would you like to take a walk with me?" she asked.

"Yes."

This weird quiet thing hung over the steps we took as I spun through mental tunnels trying to piece together the words that would make everything okay. But we didn't sidewalk or go down to the beach to our log and the lake and Switzerland. She stopped at the end of the driveway and stood up on the curb so she was taller than me and then took a breath.

"I need you," she said, "to not value our relationship anymore." She was looking me in the eyes for the first time since the last time.

"What?" My verbal tower fell with the removal of the Jenga block question and I was suddenly just a shmuck on the sidewalk.

"I need you to stop what you're doing."

"What am I doing?"

"The asking if I'm okay and writing letters and giving me gifts," Aidlyn said. "That's not helpful. I think it would be better if you just forgot that I existed." It was even-tempered. Rehearsed. It wasn't imploring. She was just telling me how it was going to be.

"Are you okay?"

"That's not something that you and I should be talking about."

"What? Of course it is! You're... you're my best friend Aidlyn. I love you. If I'm not mistaken a couple of weeks ago you Loved me too. You can feel how you want to feel, but you can't tell me not to care about you. Because I will. I'm not going to stop. I couldn't even if I wanted to. You can shut me out and keep doing your stone-cold robo-shoulder passive aggressive thing, but it isn't going to make me forget about you. You're the best thing that ever happened to me. I've never been happy like I was when we were a team. And I get it, we're broken up. But this thing that you're doing? Whatever it is, it sucks. I just..." I couldn't stop blinking. "How are you so okay? I'm like ripped to shreds over here and you're totally fine. I mean, did you care?" I asked. "Did you care at all? Was any of it real to you or were you just manipulating me like those boys back in high school?"

"I am not well, Daniel," she said, eyebrows knitting together over daggers as she spoke with that slow word-by-word clerical severity. "I have not been well for a while now for reasons that have nothing to do with you. And you, you are also not well. And I can't," the even temper broke and the just-a-girl Aidlyn leaked through again saying, "I can't make you better anymore. I am not able to do that."

She turned the back of her hoodie to face my empty person shell and began to walk back to school. As I gave up my blinking fight against the tears she rounded from a distance. "And fuck you for saying I don't care. Maybe we deal with this in different ways but how can you not see that my heart is completely broken?" She left with all the little bits of my heart stuck to the bottoms of her sneaks.

—

I found myself reacquainted with my old friend, the bathroom stall. I didn't go to cry or punch walls or think. I didn't want to do any of those things. I just wanted to flush down the drain in the darkness and become water and get soaked up and rained down on people who could still feel happy or sad or anything at all about it.

The suicide hotline number was entered into the little call box in Skype and my finger hovered over the trackpad. But what was I supposed to say? I didn't want to waste their time. I knew I wasn't going to drink bleach or pop pills or anything. I just wanted someone to tell me how to not feel the way I did. I wanted someone to go inside my brain and make me a person who could be sad without self destructing. I wanted to be able to cope like all of the people around me seemed to cope with their problems. I didn't feel like a person. I wanted to know how to be a person.

But I didn't.

I remained the same to all the people around me. I smiled and laughed and made jokes but not too many and I ate meals and went to lectures and sometimes believed in God and sometimes wasn't so sure, without admitting it to myself. It was all automatic. Like a Roomba sucking radioactive dust off the carpet after all the humans are dead. Daniel wasn't home. Daniel went away. Daniel was back in the last place he was happy. The body throwing yet another pair of shoes into a garbage can was just the place where Daniel used to live.

I didn't want to kill myself. I think I should mention that.

But I did want to die.

I really really did.

Native Tongue

"Still living the dream, Daniel?

Paul smiled from the couch across from where I was sunk down in the cushions with real coffee pouring into the empty hole. "Or did you get stranded in another foreign wild land and burn up a perfectly good camping pot?"

"I am sorry about that."

K group was my separate world where once a week, for an hour or two, I wasn't a guy living in a tiny building with his ex girlfriend. Sunk into the couch cushion with coffee warming my hands and a cookie crumbling on my knee, I was free to float away and observe other people. It was the escapist anesthesia that movies and television used to give me.

"Hey, I'd trade a pot for more stories like that any day. So how's that rocket ship? Still soaring through the cosmos?"

"You know it. Captain Kirk over here."

"You're sure?" Paul's beard could sense lies.

"Um." The rest of the group brought up things like family members dying of cancer and their estranged relatives and pressure to be things they didn't want to be. I was just some teen novel angst vampire bummed out about his ex girlfriend. It was like everything about me had become pathetic, but I could lie to those people and be a hero for not asking them to take on my sadness too.

"Actually uh, no," I said. "It's not. The rocket crash landed when... well a while ago." The mood in the room shifted as the people around me realized that I was being serious for once. "I kind of ran away from my old home in the Philippines. I was pretty messed up because... well, just because. Then I met Aidlyn. And she just got me, y'know? She could bring out this stuff inside and it was just... good. I was happy. Really happy. She was my best friend. And now she won't talk to me anymore, which—I don't know—maybe that's what you're supposed to do when you break up, but I don't want to be broken up because I miss her so much and I love her and I wanna be who I was when I was with her. I came here and met her and then I didn't hate myself or what had happened to me and she could keep me from being crazy.

"That's all gone now. And I just don't get all of this. Why do any of do this when it's all just going to go away? Nothing works out the way you want or stays the way it is or goes back to how it used to be. I've spent sitting in bathrooms with the lights off just staring at the wall because I don't know how to do it. How do people do life? Just in general? Am I nuts or is everyone else pretending that everything is just okay when really it's all drowning and falling apart?

"I hate telling you guys this. I don't wanna bum people out. Making people laugh usually makes me feel better about not feeling anything... but feeling nothing hurts so much right now. Anyway, I'm not going to hurt myself or anything. Promise. I'm kinda over that phase so you don't need to strap me down or anything. I just... I don't know. Saying it doesn't make it go away, but it makes it feel, like, real. This place and you guys are the best part of my life right now. So... thanks. A lot."

They looked at me for a little while without saying anything. The words that had come out of my mouth didn't fit with the version of myself that they were familiar with.

"I'm sorry, Daniel," said Kevin. The guy's puppy dog eyes were so sad for me. One by one the others expressed how much they wanted me to not feel like I felt and how okay it was that I did. It didn't make it all not hurt. Not for a second. But the hurt scared me a little bit less. They all put their hands on me and they prayed. If God has ever been anywhere, then He was definitely there with me then.

When I left there was this distinct glow of something warm in the bottomless hole in my chest, and whether it was love or the coffee, it gave me hope that maybe it wasn't so bottomless after all.

—

"Hey, Daniel."

I looked up from the document open on my computer screen. Gabriel was smiling his big full grin smile at me. Instinctively I became nervous about some sort of trouble I was about to get in. Not that I got into a lot of that kind of trouble but that fact never stopped me from worrying about it.

"Hey," I said, closing the lid on the mess of a story I was trying to write.

"So, Paul came and talked to me about what you shared in your K group a few days ago." We were alone by a cluster of tables near the school's main entrance. "He was a little concerned. I was wondering if you'd like to take a walk?"

My brain conjured up images of therapy and black dogs and people other than Aidlyn trying to poke around in my brain. Whatever the brand of social anxiety that made me assume that Gabriel didn't like me also prevented me from saying no to him, though, so I said, "Yeah. I'll just grab my jacket."

Our talk was sparse clishmaclaver until my sandals were dripping sand on the path through the trees by the beach. When we got there I was trying to will myself past my own gag reflex to explain my depression but was rescued from the obligation when Gabriel began explaining his own. He talked about coping strategies and prescription drugs and therapists and how some of those things kind of worked but how he had realized that they weren't the main answer he had needed.

"I read this book called A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby," he said. "It's about these strangers who meet on a rooftop on New Year's, all planning to jump off."

I did one of those quick reverse sniffs that you do when you don't have the energy to laugh. "I've read it. Last month actually."

"No kidding? God's funny like that. So then you'll remember the part months after they all first meet on the roof, when they're there again and still talking about whether or not they want to kill themselves. Then, while they're talking, this random man climbs up the ladder, sprints to the edge, and jumps without hesitating. And the characters in the book realized what I realized as well; that if I was a person who was going to kill himself then I would already be dead," he said.

"Depression is like brain flu. When you've got it, you're so stuck inside the gross feeling that it makes everything else feel gross too. A lot of years of talking to God has me at the point where I can see the value in it though. When you're healthy and happy, it's easy to ignore just how much you need God every day. Don't get me wrong, it sucks. Depression always sucks and it will never stop sucking when it happens, but it happens each time because it stopped the last time and it will stop again. The good feelings and the bad feelings are both temporary. My life has been about learning to focus on something permanent instead."

Gabriel lightened the mood a little bit after that and we talked about Nick Hornby and jogging and regular, comfy, conversation lint. This wouldn't have been remarkable except that I realized while making small talk that I wasn't faking any of it. I was being a person. I wasn't the person I had been and I certainly wasn't as happy. I wasn't coursing with that adventure that I could feel in my blood like when I was with Aidlyn and I didn't feel as warm or clever or handsome or special or needed like I had. But the thing in my head didn't seem as bad and Aidlyn hadn't fixed it for me. So that was something.

"What's going on between you and Aidlyn?" he asked after a while. "You two spend a lot of time together, is something in motion there?"

"Um, well, no. I'd say the motion has definitely stopped."

"What happened?"

"I don't know," I said honestly. "She won't even talk to me. I'm not sure if I messed it up or if she just stopped being interested but I feel pretty sure like things aren't going to start moving again."

"I wouldn't give up so quickly," said Gabriel. "I've seen a lot of relationships at this school and I can tell you that nothing is ever truly static."

"We'll see."

Sea Song

one

"Just once more. Then I'll leave you alone forever, I promise."

"Okay."

two

We did the familiar functions of putting on jackets and mittens and shoes and went once again together out through the double door entrance into the night.

three

"Your jacket is zipped up."

"An old friend of mine told me I would stay warmer that way."

four

"She sounds smart. And like, super hot too. But not hot in a cheerleader kind of way. More of a fierce, adventurous hot like Keira Knightley."

I had no idea how much I missed it.

five

We sat down on our log on the sand at the end of the world.

six

"So... if you were going to start a conversation right now..."

seven

"Aidlyn," I said.

"Correct."

"Yeah, I'm good with details like that. Not with others though. For instance, I don't know where I'm from. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't know why my brain makes me happy sometimes and sad others. I don't know why God doesn't put a neon sign in everyone's yards telling them that He exists. I don't know what your umbrellas mean or what you're thinking or how to read your mind or why I ever agreed to break up with you. Honestly, I don't know much. But I know I love you more than I ever thought I could love anyone," I said. "I want to be where you are. I want to give up whatever I have to give up to do that. Because any version of my life is better with you."

Aidlyn continued staring out across the water, poker faced in the shadows.

"I applied to college in Manitoba," I pressed on. "Not to your college. I didn't want to freak you out that much. But I got my acceptance letter today. It's pretty close to where you'll be living, I think. I mean, it's a big province and everything but on Google Maps... never mind. Look, if you don't want to be with me, that's fine. I'm not trying to stalk you or anything. I would just never forgive myself if I went through the rest of my life thinking that the reason we weren't together was because I wouldn't move to Manitoba. So, Aidlyn," I said. "Would you be on a team with me again?"

Time stopped moving like it had in London and forever filled the seconds that I spent waiting for the response hidden behind her smirking face as she stared off into the distance. Like, metaphors aside, a long time went by.

"You know this whole waiting for a response is a kind of torturing me, right?"

She nodded.

"Of course you do."

She turned to look me in the eyes with those pools of resolute blue with white flashes in them like stars in the night sky. She held that stare, looking way down inside for the last time and said, "I am going to choose to say no to that request."

My heart became a shoe reglued one too many times.

"Oh," I said. "Okay. Thanks for listening."

She and I walked together back to school. Aidlyn made small talk like things were normal and we were just two friends. I said words back and stared down at my toes, cold in sandals, sidewalking up the asphalt. We walked over the world with the cross in the center. She stopped on the porch before opening the door and turned to me.

"You know what your problem is?" she asked.

"What's that?" I stared up, looking somewhere past her face.

"You need to stop trying to make everything like a movie." Then she went inside.

And I guess I followed. Not with her, though. Just, like, adjacent to her. Because we both happened to live in that building. Just existing.

I went back to my room and opened my laptop to that story I'd been writing. I highlighted it all and pressed the delete key and then replaced it with a single line:

Love is a fucking cancer.

—

Clumps of black hair. Streaks of red. Scattered fragments. A cold breeze without fire. It's dark. A discarded eyepatch. A one legged Wallace bends down by the crumpled frame of the eternal romantic.

Wallace: Jason? Jason, say something. Come on, Jason! Stallion! Captain? I'll call you whatever you want just... please? ... I don't want to be here alone.

Reveries en Couleurs

Not even breakfasts were good anymore.

"So what are you doing after The Haus ends?" It was Jackson, the guy who used to have gauges in his ears but now just had holes like little cat anuses in his lobes (as he described them) because of our school's dress code. He sat across from me at the breakfast table.

"I'm going to Morocco," I said.

"Oh yeah? You going alone?" He asked. I nodded. "Why Morocco?"

"I dunno. Something about the desert sounds nice right now."

"Like the Sahara desert?"

"Yeah."

"You're going to the Sahara desert?" I nodded. He shrugged. "Right on."

"This coffee is so bad," I said, taking another sip. "You think they forgot to clean the tank?"

"No dude, it's always this bad."

"Really?"

"Yup."

"I mean, it was always bad but it never seemed this bad."

"It's pretty much always been this bad."

"It's like life," I said.

"Terrible?"

"Yeah."

"I gotcha."

For some time we sat silently, both of us staring out at the happy faces eating the breakfast I used to love.

"It's like love," I said, finally breaking the silence.

"Let me guess..."

"Terrible."

"Mm. You too?"

"Me too what?"

"This is about Aidlyn, right?"

"..."

"That bad, eh?"

"The coffee used to taste good. Like it wasn't good but it tasted good," I said.

"No it didn't."

"But it did. To me."

"But it wasn't."

"It was," I implored. "It was beautiful."

"Okay."

"I loved it."

"Of course."

"But now?" I said.

"Terrible."

"Ding ding ding," I mumbled.

"See her?" He pointed. "Over with Miles and the crew?"

"Who, Katrina?"

"Yeah, Katrina. Katrina and I kind of had a thing last semester."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yup. Not like super serious but we wrote letters and stuff."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yup. Like, we weren't dating or anything but she definitely made it seem like that was a potential possibility."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yup."

"But?"

"But that." Jackson pointed to Katrina's hand reaching out to grab Miles' under the table.

"Gross," I said.

"Whatever."

"Sorry, dude."

"It's whatever. Sorry about Aidlyn."

"Whatever."

"You still like her?"

"No," I said.

"Good."

"I love her with the intensity of a thousand beating hearts in a lonely wilderness."

"Oh. I gotcha."

"But it's whatever. You still like her?" I nodded to Katrina.

"Meh. Sometimes. I dunno. It would have been nice to get an explanation or something. She just stopped hanging out with me all of a sudden."

"TELL ME ABOUT IT!" I slammed my coffee cup against the table. There was a momentary silence in the room. I took a sip from the mostly spilled mug and they all went back to their conversations. "I need more coffee," I said.

"No you don't."

"No, I don't."

We sat.

"I'm getting more coffee," I said.

"Come on, let's going outside."

"But outside is—"

"Terrible. I get it but just come on."

So we went outside.

"...I would go with you to Morocco," he said as we crossed the railroad tracks. "But I already made plans to do this hiking trip with Lanae."

"You're not going back out with the Manitoba boys?"

"They kind of got sick of me during that Christmas break trip we did."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Oh no, like, I was totally sick of them too. Like, they're cool or whatever but I think we have very different attitudes about traveling. They wanted to see museums and Josh kept this tight schedule and I kind of just wanted to be like, 'Hey, that's a cool thingy over there, let's just go check it out,' and they'd be like, 'myeh myeh myeh, Notre Dame! Bleh bleh bleh.' And like, I'd get pretty moody too because we spent so much time together."

For a few moments our conversation became the sound of his sneakers and my sandals snapping over the forest's carpet of twigs. As we delved into the new springing woods I couldn't decide whether the fact that everything still looked so beautiful made all of the bad stuff better or more tragic.

"I guess if you want to hate your friends you should travel together for two weeks," Jackson said after some thought. "Oh well."

"So who have you been hanging out with since then?"

"Uuuum. I mean everybody I guess, but mostly no one. Katrina and her peeps used to be my little gang but... y'know."

"It's really weird, isn't it?" I asked.

"What is?"

"Just how different things get."

"I was thinking about that too. Like, I feel like a totally different person than I was when I came here. And it's weird that it will keep changing and in another year I might be all different than I am now. It's actually just kind of amazing how anyone our age can have friends or date each other for more than a couple months when we're constantly becoming different."

"I don't know," I said. "I mean, is that because we're young or do people just change? Is there like, a point where we'll stop and just be somebody until we die?"

"I think you at least start changing less fast. Like, my dad will probably be different when he's eighty, but the difference between him then and him now will be less significant than the difference from me ten years ago and me now. Maybe."

We talked with our footsteps for another while. I decided that maybe it was both. There's a reason that The Fellowship of the Ring goes straight from Gandalf dying in the dark mines of Moria to the beautiful elvish city of Lothlórien. It keeps you from getting stuck in the suck of what just happened but also nags at the back of your mind with the quiet notion that Gandalf can't be there to see it all with them.

"Why didn't we hang out more last semester?" I asked Jackson.

"Because you were always on adventures with Max and Aidlyn and I was out with Katrina and Sam and Brett."

"Do you wanna be friends? Also can you pretend like I didn't just ask a question that lame?"

He stopped and looked at me. "I mean really we could just get married to each other and then we'd be totally set."

"I did make some promise to Max about living with him in the woods."

"We can get a polygamy thing going on there. I'm cool sharing Max with you."

"Done. No more women."

"Done."

"You know, I mean unless Aidlyn changes her mind in which case I'm, like, gone."

"Oh yeah, I mean if there's a woman option then I'll see you when I see you."

"Where have you been all my life?"

"Manitoba."

"Oh that's right, I'm sorry," I said. "You know I'm moving there?"

"Why on earth would you move to Manitoba?"

"Chalk it up to poor life decisions."

Then I realized the difference. In Lord of the Rings, everyone knows Gandalf comes back in the next installment. Or at least everyone hopes he will. Maybe that's what you need for beauty to mean anything after all the ugly bits: hope that whatever you lost back there can be replaced somehow.

Hymns of Love and Spirits

It was another Saturday

"Is this stealing?" I asked, digging through Tyler's clothes for his climbing ropes.

"Umm, if Abraham Lincoln took some guy's wallet and used the money to buy his stovepipe hat, would that have been stealing?"

"Yes." I threw the rope over my shoulder and tossed Jackson the carabiners.

"Right. But is Abraham Lincoln more awesome with a stovepipe hat?"

"I'm not sure that—"

"Do you love slavery, Daniel? Is that what you're telling me?"

"No, Jackson, I do not love slavery." I put on the sneakers. I say the sneakers as opposed to my sneakers because my sneakers, as you may recall, had gone in the garbage. These were sneakers I'd sourced from the lost and found. "But I guess we are kind of teaching him a lesson."

"That you can't trust your friends?"

Eyes rolled as we walked past our classmates on the way to the door with climbing gear thrown over our shoulders. This was pretty typical for the two of us at that point.

"No," I said as we crossed the street. "That you should never date anyone because you'll lose track of all the things you love."

"I'm glad to see you're not carrying any bitterness around."

"None at all. I just think that everyone should break up with each other because LOVE SUCKS!"

"Hey... guys," said Tyler. He, and his girlfriend Juliette, who was visiting from the States for the week, were now in front of us on the sidewalk holding hands. "Um, is that my climbing rope?"

"I'm not sure what you're talking about," I said. "Oh! Haha! This uh, you mean this um... yes. Yes it's your rope. May we borrow it?"

"Juliette, has anyone told you how handsome your boyfriend is?" asked Jackson. "Real keeper."

Tyler: "Whatever guys, just bring it back when you're done."

"You got it."

—

I jumped. For a moment, while falling, things were okay. I could die or live and there was, in free fall, no room for any thoughts in between. Gravity made me faster than everything else. Then the rope went tight. I swung. My fingers scraped a branch. I caught hold with one hand but momentum carried me farther out in a pendulum arc. Then I felt the sickening release of tension on my abdomen and I was falling again. I didn't feel anything this time. Except the ground, which I felt very very hard.

"Dude, are you okay?" Jackson was standing over me. I looked around to find the explanation for what had happened. My belt, to which the climbing rope had been secured, lay snapped in two pieces in the dirt.

"Yeah." I stood up just to make sure that I could. "Little sore. Maybe a bruised testicle. Ooh, or two."

"So why are you really going to Manitoba?" Jackson asked as he helped me waddle back to school.

I thought about the question for a while and released a slow sigh as we crossed back over the railroad tracks. "I dunno."

"Like, couldn't you just go anywhere? You know Manitoba is a terrible place, right?"

"Yeah, I've gathered."

"I mean, awful. You don't understand. In winter you will wish that you were dead. And not like in a depression kind of way, just in a, 'oh my gosh I'm so cold I don't want to live anymore' kind of way."

"Yeah, well."

"Be honest. Are you going there because a little part of you still wants to be with Aidlyn?"

"A huge part of me still wants to be with Aidlyn," I said. "I completely want to be with Aidlyn. But I want to be with the Aidlyn that wanted to be with me." We passed the Hell's Angels bar. "It doesn't really look like that person is around anymore."

"So why are you following her to Manitoba?" Jackson held up a hand to stop the oncoming cars so we could cross the street. His question was one that I had been circling around at a safe distance for some time.

"I dunno." And maybe I didn't.

"If she showed up at your school and asked if you wanted to start dating again, would you say yes?"

"Absolutely. I mean I think so... I don't know. I guess I'd have to make sure I still knew who she was first. Right now I feel like I kind of don't."

"Sort of spoils the romanticy movie ending."

"Yeah. Jackson?"

"Yeah, bud."

"Falling out of trees hurts way less than falling in love."

He nodded sagely. "But both will bruise you testicles."

I nodded. "It sucks." We entered the Constance Haus parking lot and crossed over the painted cobble map of the globe with the cross on it.

"But it's also kinda the only thing that doesn't suck," he said.

"You guys have my climbing gear?" Tyler and his girlfriend were standing just inside the door. "Juliette and I were going to try slack lining in the orchard."

"Um..." I said. Tyler's patience looked about as thin as the leather of the belt that was no longer suspending my pants. "We'll be right back."

"Nothing's wrong!" Jackson called over his shoulder as we scampered back out the door to retrieve the ropes we'd left in the woods.

Smoke Leaves a Trace

We were near the end of it.

The Bible school hourglass was running short on sand and the looming shadow of long goodbyes hung over The Haus. Effects of this reality took different forms for different people. I saw blurry eyes and increased confessions of romance, extravagant celebrations of friendship, long walks on the beach, and a few blank faces staring at walls or out windows with eyes like dead light bulbs. Jackson and I were pontificating on our experiences over a couple of stiff bottles of a curious German Coca-Cola product called Mezzo Mix. It was while drinking these beverages that we happened upon a figure slumped lazily against the wall directly across from my dorm room.

"You okay, Tyler?"

He looked up and gave us the weak smile of a fractured soul. "Where are you guys off to?"

"Mischief and hijinks," I said slowly. "The usual."

Tyler's laugh wouldn't have knocked over a house of cards. "Have fun."

I slid into place on the floor to his right and Jackson sat against the opposite wall, all of our legs obstructing the hallway, which was vacant anyway, everyone off making last memories.

"Tell us your troubles, sonny," Jackson affected the voice of a weathered bartender. I put my bottle of Mezzo Mix in Tyler's limp hand.

"I don't want to bum you guys out," Tyler said.

"Lady problems?" I guessed.

"Yeah. Yeah something like that."

"Spill it. If you're willing, anyway."

Tyler sighed. "Yeah, okay." He then proceeded to tell us the story of his feminine woes. They went something like this:

Once upon a time in America, there was a boy named Tyler. Tyler fell in love with a beautiful girl named Juliette. Tyler romanced Juliette with flowers and impassioned speeches and dramatic, elaborate, adventurous dates. The two soon became inseparable, hopelessly, irrevocably in love. All was well and good until school finished and Tyler chose to go to Germany for a year and Juliette to start college. The couple, determined to stay together, went through great efforts to keep the life in their relationship despite the long distance. Tyler stayed up through all hours of the night to talk to her on the phone and Juliette bought a plane ticket to fly to Germany and visit him towards the end of his program. She arrived and Tyler met her at the train station with flowers and they kissed and it was all very romantic.

"...and we get back to school," said Tyler. "I'm bringing her stuff to her room when her phone rings from inside the bag. I unlocked it. I guess in my head I was thinking maybe I could leave her a cute note or that maybe it was an emergency or something, but I think in the back of my mind I was suspicious. Anyway, I open it up and I see this really long conversation that she's been having with this guy from her college. This was a guy that I'd asked her about back when we were still in school together and she'd told me nothing was going on. Well, apparently, there was a lot of something going on."

"Dude," said Jackson, compacting as much sympathy as possible into a single syllable.

"So my head starts spinning and I'm obviously furious but also just... like I couldn't feel anything. I mean, I really love her. Loved her... I don't know. And this is on the first day that she comes to visit, so she was here for another week no matter what. I went and found her and told her I knew about this other guy and we had a huge fight."

"You guys seemed totally normal the other day," I said.

"Well I was trying. I wanted to stay together. She said sorry and I forgave her and we were giving it a shot. I thought it was going well. We got to spend a lot of time together and we were going on dates and stuff and I thought we would be okay. Then a couple days ago she flew back home and last night—I probably kept you up, Daniel, sorry. I was talking to her on Skype for like, three hours. Anyway, she broke up with me so that she could date the guy from the text message."

"Oh, so she's just a legitimate monster." Looking at the broken face next to me I felt like I was standing across time from my old self. Selves, I guess.

"Yeah," he said. "I—" and his voice broke as he tried to say something so simple without sounding trite. "I really loved her."

"I'm sorry, Tyler." Jackson put a hand on his shoulder.

In that moment I would have sworn my life to whatever army could fight that kind of injustice. That's what's so cruel about heartache though; there's no retaliation. You can't launch a campaign and defeat it, because by the time you're there, you've already lost. Your spirit evaporates when the person who once told you that you were loved cracks open your soul. There's no will then to do anything but drool into a puddle like Tyler on the carpet, sucking down dregs of orange flavored Coke.

"When people go through big emotional traumas," I said after a while, "the first thing that therapists will have them do is tell the story. That's it. And then the next session, the person comes back and they'll tell the story again." I knew this because Aidlyn knew this. "They keep on repeating that process until the story of what happened stops being the thing that causes the pain and then they can work from there. Or something. I'm not a therapist and I've never been raped or watched someone die in front of me, but I was cheated on for three years by my best friend with my old best friend. After I'd told that story once I was able to tell it to more people. And now I'm pretty good at telling it. I almost like telling it because when I do, I get to define it instead of it defining me. So, if you'll indulge me, Tyler, I want you to tell us your story again. Condense it down into something that you can repeat easily to more people." I just wanted so badly to stop another person from running a boxcutter over their chest or wetting their pants in the dark.

"Okay, I guess." he said. "I was dating this girl named Juliette..." Then we heard the story again, more succinct and fact oriented.

"How do you feel?" asked Jackson.

"I feel..." We watched him self-assess as he tipped the vestiges of an emptied Mezzo Mix into his mouth. "Angry," he finished.

"We can work with angry." I checked my watch. There was enough time, but we would have to hurry. "You still have a bunch of her stuff?"

"Yeah," he said. "I have like, a whole box of letters and gifts that she gave me."

"If we're doing what I think we're doing then I have some stuff to grab too," said Jackson.

"Alright. Let's grab everything and meet back here in three minutes."

"Do you have a lighter?" Jackson whirled around to ask the question, already fifteen feet down the hall towards his room.

"Y—no," I said, instinctively patting my pocket. "Not anymore."

"I have one," said Tyler. I'd forgotten about his fashionable penchant for expensive cigars.

"Autobots!" I cried. "Roll out!"

"Whoah, whoah, whoah." My declarative index finger found itself jammed toward the now open door of our Resident Advisor, Jordahl. "Okay, Optimus," he said. "Do I want to know what you guys are heading out less than an hour before curfew to do with a lighter?"

"Birthday candles," said Jackson.

"See," said Jordahl holding up his hands, "the reality is that I can just tell you no, or you can explain what's going on and maybe I'll look the other way."

"Tyler just got his heart totally ripped into little pieces by his girlfriend," I said.

"Who, Juliette?" asked Jordahl.

"Ex-girlfriend," Tyler corrected.

"Oh man, what happened?"

"We'd been dating for a while, she lied to me about a guy, she came to Germany to visit me, I found out, we agreed to forget it and make things work, she left, and then she called me last night to tell me that she's dumping me for the guy she lied to me about."

Jordahl winced and mimed a punch to the gut. "Oof. So what, you're burning a stuffed doll of her or something?"

"I have a bunch of letters she wrote," said Tyler.

"It's therapy," I added.

Jordahl laughed. "Yeah. Alright then. Just please, please, please don't get in trouble with the German police. And if Gabe finds out, you didn't talk to me, alright? Also be back before lock up or I will leave you outside."

"Thanks, Jordahl," I said.

"Yeah, well... I dated a girl like that once," he said. "You guys should get some hot dogs. They taste better when you cook them over an ex-girlfriend fire."

"We'll take that under advisement."

"Have fun. And hey, Tyler? Sorry that happened to you. The reality is that it'll probably get worse before it gets better. Just don't start dating her again. No matter what."

"Okay," he said.

Two minutes and fifty seconds later we were three panting lungs in the hallway in hastily adorned jackets with fags of dead romance and salvaged kindling bundled in our arms. Jackson led the way out through the raised eyebrows and hot chocolate mugs on our path to the altar. As we neared the door I nearly crashed into the jacket zipping ghost that had my lighter.

"Oh dear," Aidlyn looked from me to Jackson to the pile in my arms that she recognized as tinder. "So, uh, whatcha doing?"

The query was inflected more to make me ask myself the question but, at that particular moment, I had enough bro zest to push down my urge to seize the opportunity to talk to her again and I kept running, returning over my shoulder, "We're burning a witch!" The double doors swung open to another breath of cold night.

—

We dug the fire pit in the sand in the shadow of a weathered tree on the Bodensee shore. Somewhere down the bank was a post with a sign with a cartoon of a fire and a red line crossed through it. Not speaking German, we obviously couldn't be expected to understand what that meant.

"Why'd you bring the deodorant?" I asked.

Jackson was shaking the spray can over my lighter as it went,

shick, shick

while Tyler unloaded a bag of broken memories.

"'Cause this." He sprayed the aerosol at the baby flame lapping at the toilet paper and I stumbled back from the pocket sized Hiroshima blast of body spray and hungry fire. He tossed the can aside and we made our seats in the artificial beach around our new crackling pit of light and warm.

"Alright, whadoowegot?" I asked.

"Just this." Jackson pulled a neatly folded sheet of notebook paper from within his jacket.

"Who's it from?" asked Tyler as he pulled a curious mason jar from his bag.

"Katrina," he said. "She wrote it to me to explain the whole thing with Miles and how she still wanted to be friends. I dunno. Like, I'm not mad about it or anything but I'm cool with brushing over that whole thingy and, I mean, we're having a fire so I obviously had to bring something to toss into it."

"Let it burn, brother," I said.

Jackson dropped the letter into the pile of sticks and toilet paper ash and we watched the heat stab through the center of it and spread out until the blackening met the edge and the whole thing became indistinguishable from the rest of the dark heap.

"Why are your love letters in a jar?" asked Jackson.

Tyler spun the thing around in his hands, letting the tightly rolled scrolls tumble along with the unfurled papers inside. "She wrote a letter for every day I'd be here at Bible school. I've been opening one each morning."

"They're hand written?"

"Yeah. I think there's about a hundred a fifty of them."

"That must have taken her forever," I said.

"Yeah... See? The one's I haven't opened even have little strings tied around them."

"How could a person do something like that and then cheat on you two months later? I just—I mean how can you feel so strongly about something one minute and then be so completely different later on?"

"I don't know," said Tyler. "But screw it." He dumped all of the little notes into the pit.

"Did she ever explain why?" asked Jackson. We watched the orange flickering glow as the fire climbed the mountain of love letters and proactive lies. "Like, what changed?"

Tyler shook his head. "Not really." We watched the flames in his eyes as he stared straight through the burnt letters. "People just change."

"People suck," I said.

"Change sucks," Jackson amended.

"Yeah." I tossed my own letter into the fire.

"Was that from Aidlyn?"

I nodded. "The old Aidlyn."

"How's that going?" asked Tyler.

"Static," I said. "Infinite static."

"It'll get better," said Jackson. "Like, in a year or however long we'll move on and maybe date other people and it won't be a big deal. It's just time."

"I hate that though," I said. "I don't want to not feel this way because then what was the point of having felt this way in the first place?"

"Yeah," said Tyler. "I get that. Like, I still love Juliette. I mean, I hate her too but I still love her. It's weird to think that I won't anymore. That I'll be... I don't know."

"Different."

The paper was mostly one black dune in the blaze now, pieces torn off and blown into the sky or out to the water. They were gone. We sat in reverence of it all until the fire burned low and I looked to their faces in the dim glow; phoenix smirks in the forbidden light on the shore of Constance.

As the hour went by we burned more scraps of paper and an old bag and an expensive new sweater. Those newly made tragedies became the fire and our smiles broadened with each article as the ridiculousness of it all filled the empty holes more and more. We were laughing by the end like old war buddies drunk together after all the battles were past. With minutes to spare before we would be sealed off in the night, we took cover in the trees and Jackson hurled the spent deodorant canister into the fire's remnants.

"Is this gonna work?" Tyler asked.

"There might not be enough—" I fell back on my butt as pebbles in the sand whizzed by my head and the sharp explosive pop of the bursting can echoed straight out to Switzerland. Dazed a second, we looked first to the fire, which was now not a fire but a broad scattered field of bleeding embers, and then we looked at each other and collapsed into hysterics. We kicked out the last of the glowing specks as quickly as possible and raced the clock back in time to meet Jordahl at the closing doors.

"How was it?" he asked.

"It was," Tyler panted, "pretty great."

We all went to our rooms. I had one foot on the ladder up to my bunk when I instead ripped the comforter from the mattress and tossed it into the corner.

"Yu uhkuh?" Tyler was brushing his teeth near the door.

"Very," I said, grabbing my pillow and throwing it over in the same direction. "I actually kind of hate sleeping in beds."

Tyler spat. "You hate sleeping in beds?"

"Yeah. I've always preferred the floor. I just felt too weird to do it with roommates around. But you know what?" I cocooned myself in the blanket on the ground by the sliding glass door. "This is me. Little nuts. I mean a little nuts. Though if you ask my first girlfriend..."

He laughed. "Hey thanks for doing that." He got into his own bed and stared up at the bottom of my empty mattress. "At the beach."

"No worries," I said. "I get how it is to spend too much time wandering around in your own head."

"People need people," said Tyler.

I smiled to myself in the corner. "People need people," I agreed as the lights went out.

A Year in Its Passing

On the last night, I sat there with all of them, staring out at the lake.

Max, Jackson, Rose, and Aidlyn, all there on the beach. Every now and again I glanced off at my unreadable blinking mountain dot future, but mostly I just studied the back of Aidlyn's head as she talked about returning to Manitoba. The lilt in her voice was excitement but also I think she was trying to emphasize that this wasn't as tragic for her as it was for most of us. Maybe she just wanted me to know that. That it wouldn't hurt her. That my absence would not be felt. Or maybe I was just making everything that she did or that ever happened to her about myself. Maybe I was just a selfish jerk sitting at the at the bottom of Germany. Maybe a lot of things.

Regardless, I sat and stared at the back of that girl's head as our conversation about leaving slowly sank in the water and became silence; daring one of us to do it first. I didn't move. I sat and watched the back of Aidlyn's head. Because I knew this was probably the last time I would ever see her. I wanted something to happen. I did want it to be like a movie. I wanted to be about to give up and then hear her footsteps run up and wrap her arms around me like at the train station.

"Hey, Anastasia's at the bar," said Rose, looking up from her phone. "She wants us to come say goodbye."

"Okay," said Jackson, lifting himself from the ground. "Coming, Dan?"

"Yeah," I said without moving my head. "Yeah, I'm coming." I stood up. Aidlyn and Max didn't budge. "How about you guys?" I asked.

"Umm, I don't know if you remember, but things did not end great with Anastasia and me and... people." Max had been the unwilling participant of a dramatic love triangle a few months earlier. A few of them actually. The thought made me smile despite myself.

"Aidlyn?"

"I'm good," she said.

The tone of her voice deflated me but regardless of the fact I said, "I'm leaving early tomorrow, so I guess this is goodbye."

"Alright. Goodbye, Mr. Foutz. I wish you well."

Maxwell got up and hugged me. "Don't die in Morocco, man."

"Thanks, Max."

"Yo, Dan! Time's a wastin'!" Jackson's affected accent was already in the trees with Rose waiting for me.

"Coming!" I called out. "Bye, Aidlyn."

She held up the peace sign. I left the beach forever, having squeezed in one final heartbreak to remember the place by.

—

Jackson and I didn't stay long at the bar. We popped in, said hello, goodbye, and then left to go on a farewell death march. Sidewalking through Fishbach we passed cluster after cluster of Haus students. Each time we had to pass out hugs and say more last words and all that stuff you do when you leave. I got hugs from a hundred halfway strangers and just two fingers from the person I loved most in the world. This movie wouldn't make it to the Hallmark channel.

"Tomorrow night we're not gonna go to sleep at Constance Haus," said Jackson. We were just meandering now, running out time, not wanting to end the day just yet.

"I know."

"We're going to get in planes and trains and spread out literally all over the planet."

"Yeah."

"It's not like I'm actually even super close with anyone here but, like, when else are we going to always be surrounded by people we love and who love us just because they live in the same building?"

"No kidding."

"You ready?"

I looked at him in the streetlight. "I dunno."

"Me neither."

"We should climb something," I said. "Something big. They can't kick us out on our last day."

"We could get arrested."

"Yeah, but would it really be so terrible to be forced to stay in Germany longer?"

—

Weeds reached through the chain link fence and a forklift sat derelict behind locked metal turnstiles. Clambering over the barrier, we found ourselves fighting through thorns in the bushes as we wound through obstacle course pallets and rusted barrels. I put my lost and found sneaker into Jackson's woven hands and he lifted me high enough to grab the fire escape. Soon we were spiraling up to the third floor of Fishbach's abandoned primary school.

"Not bad," Jackson said.

I didn't stop. "We can do better."

I balanced myself on the handrail, getting just high enough to clamber up onto the roof. I gave Jackson a hand and we sat with our legs dangling over the edge. We could see everything from up there. The lake, Switzerland, The Haus, the train station, the Catholic church, miles of apple trees picked clean, and the observation tower in Friedrichshafen with its grave of promised forevers. We watched noiselessly there as Haus students passed by on the sidewalk below; faces we knew we wouldn't see again. We were both sort of done with goodbyes. We loved those people. Even the ones we hardly spoke to. We knew that and we knew that they probably felt more or less the same way. We were also okay with the idea of not seeing them ever again and we knew they probably felt more or less the same way about that too. You need to climb something to sort a feeling like that out in your brain.

"I think I am ready," I said eventually. "I'll be living close enough to you and Max so I'll probably see you two again. And even if I don't, I didn't know you before I came here. I knew other people who I won't see again. Or maybe I will. And I love a lot of those people and I love a lot of you people and there will be more people out there who I'll meet and love and leave behind..."

"...But?" he asked.

"I wish it could have ended better. I mean, I really wish that Aidlyn still loved me and blah blah happy ever after, but it would be nice to have at least..." I opened and closed my mouth a few times, "I dunno. Not leave on this cold shoulder day. I guess. With everything that happened; with how different I am because of her..." I blew out a loose mist into the night. "I just wish it was a little warmer." Jackson nodded and then said some things I didn't listen to because I was thinking. "I still love her you know."

"Obviously."

"I know. It's just, I can't say it to her anymore and you're kind of my best friend, so now you get to hear me moan about it."

"It'll be good for you to not live in the same building as her."

"Yeah," I said. "But I still want to. I want it to all work out. I want it to be like a movie."

"It isn't. It won't be. Life sucks. It sucks, like, eighty percent of the time."

"Doesn't seem worth it when you put it like that."

"Well it's not worth it, is it?"

"Depressing."

"I don't think so," he said. "Like, sure if this was all there was then, yeah, I'd say we should all just take some pills and be done with it. Life probably hurts too much to be worth living it for life's sake. But now isn't the point, is it? Like, forever is. We keep walking because we're hoping for something better at the end of it all." He shrugged. "That's what I believe anyway. Something to think about."

"...Yeah," I said. I resolved that I would think about it, but not right that second. There was so much change happening in that second as it was. "I'm gonna miss you," I told him. "I don't think I've ever said that and meant it as honestly to anyone who I've never made out with before."

"Oh, so is this the part where we kiss?"

"Yeah," I said. "If life was like a movie. Like, a French movie."

"Lucky it's not then."

"I guess it is."

—

We went home for the last time that it would be. He went to bed. I went to the internet room to print my ticket to Morocco. With everything done and on my way to my never-made mattress, I felt like this could all do. It wasn't an A plus. It wasn't even a B as far as closure went. It was probably like a C minus of a last day. But it was a pass anyway. I headed down the hall for the door, waving a few goodbyes to people sitting against the walls.

Shuck, shuck, shuck

Her sock footsteps came up out of nowhere. Before I had the time to turn around, I felt Aidlyn's arms wrap around me and she squeezed her head against my back. She let go so I could face her and then we hugged properly. I held her so tight. If I had held her any closer I would have been on the other side of her. I wanted to hold her there forever like in the phone booth. It wasn't forever, though. It was a couple of seconds. Then she pulled back, hands on my arms, and she looked at me, smiling like she hadn't smiled at me since back when my life was perfect.

"Daniel Foutz," she said. "I will miss you very much."

The responses bottlenecked in my brain in a rush to seize this last chance. I thought of it too; the perfect line. It probably wouldn't have changed anything but who knows? I didn't say it. This is what I did say:

"I'll miss you too. Goodnight, Miss Penner." Then I held up my hand and spread my fingers apart. Just two of them. Peace.

Because you tend to mimic the gestures of people you admire.

She touched a finger to her nose. I walked away. That was the last time I saw the only girl I have ever truly loved.

...for like a while anyway.

Leave Someone

Day 1

A stranger held up the sign: "Daniel welcome to Marrakech." I greeted him, as I had practiced, in Arabic. He asked me, also in Arabic, if I spoke Arabic and I replied, in Arabic, that I spoke a little Arabic, which was an enormously generous self evaluation that I regretted immediately as the next three things he said on the way to the van were in Arabic and I didn't understand a one of them. I did, however, recognize when he asked me where I was from, to which I replied that I was from Canada.

"Parlez-vous Français?" he asked, brightening as he opened the passenger seat for me.

"Un petit peu?" So I was treated to some French that I didn't understand as we pulled out of the parking lot. It didn't take long for the smile to creep onto his face as he realized that Canadians are just as dumb as Americans.

"This is Medina," he said in surprisingly articulate English, pointing at the twenty foot clay brick wall we were now puttering beside through the swarm of traffic and street vendors. "The old city. This wall, maybe it is fourteen hundred years old. It was built to protect the city from invaders," he explained. "But later the city is bigger so now it's just a wall that protects nothing." He laughed. "That wall," he continued, pointing over the streetlights and through the hotels to the shadow of a rocky hill spined by another impressive barrier, "was built later. But it doesn't go around the city. That wall protects the military fort." He turned and smiled, "Walls used to keep Moroccan people safe. Now they keep us out. Ah," he shrugged, "so it is."

Day 2

For a while I struggled up there at the front of the bus with the grey haired French tourists, but they refused to say a word of English to me even though I knew they could have. My French was so bad that I think I told the smiling man next to me that I was an Iceland worker. Then he began vomiting as we snaked through the high altitude snow blankets of the Atlas mountains. We were headed for the desert. The desert. The Sahara. I was trying to get the smell of French puke out of my trusty Scotland-battered jacket with my boots in two inches of snow and in less than twenty four hours our tourist tub would roll into the Sahara desert. Life seemed to simply become more and more unlikely.

When I got back on the bus, the cool Turkish girls in the back waved me over. I went and sat with them and Timon from Amsterdam and we spoke to each other in English about Turkish politics and Netherlandish real estate tycoons. I stuck with them as we wandered around breathtaking ancient sand castle cities, unabandoned only because they made good set pieces for Game of Thrones. We walked through deep cut gorges with rose rock canyon walls that made you feel so small and we ate spicy tagine from golden dishes in a palm garden overrun with stray cats. I sat outside a carpet maker's house because Timon had been kicked out for questioning the authenticity of the man's camel hair and I didn't want him to be all alone in the dusty clay wall alleyway.

As the sun sank behind the mountains, we made one final stop before our hotel to get out and look at these impossible formations of natural rock. It was there that the French guy who threw up next to me earlier walked over and put a palm on my shoulder. He pointed to the stones in the sunset light and said, "Here... is the hand of God." Those were the only words he said in English that whole trip.

We stayed in a hotel that stood alone, miles from anything, tucked away in some rough hills in the place where the canyonlands ended and petered out slowly into flat desert. It was like a lonely Rick's Café, this warm cozy timber and clay building out in the center of nowhere. Inside we all sat in a room with a fire, warm whispering in the corner, and we ate more tagine and flat bread. Afterwards I went up to the balcony with the Turkish girls and Simon and I sat with them as they smoked weed and looked up at the cold night sky and talked about how it was all so beautiful and I thought about how it was all so different than my life three days ago. But then I closed my eyes to sleep and she was still there. She was still there and I still missed her so so much.

Day 3

We drove through miles and miles of the flattest nothing you've ever seen. It was a spectacular nothing though. That flat nothingness under the Moroccan sun was a profound kind of blank canvas that reminded you that once the world was bare and wild, and then we built clay stone walls and Disney castles and missionary schools and the London bridge (three times over) and catholic churches with spaces in the windowsills for beautiful girls to sit, and it all rose up from the same dust that God breathed into Adam in an apple orchard when the earth was a different earth than it is now. Maybe.

We arrived at the last building. From it stretched a wall out forever to either side so all you could see was the flatness leading up to it. Entering this building, ducking under a splintered wooden arch, I walked down a narrow hallway to a metal door. Behind this door there was no more flatness. There was no more dirt or scattered clay ruins. This was the gateway to the Sahara. I got dizzy standing there on the other side of the door. You could wander those dunes for years through nine different countries and you could build a thousand granular Everests and replace all the water in the Mediterranean with sand over and over again and not put a dent in the grains under my feet.

To top off the surrealism, there at the Sahara's mouth were eight saddled camels kneeling with a pair of Berber tribesman standing in black headdress, waiting to take us out and be swallowed into the wind shifting world. It was more different an experience than anything else. Nothing I'd seen was like standing on the other side of that door.

Up and down sliding slopes, the sure feet of the camel beneath me somehow found his footholds as our caravan snaked deeper and deeper into the last sunlight catching the golden dunes. We rode for an hour or more until everything was black. And I mean everything was really black. There were no city lights in any direction. We didn't even have flashlights. We simply arrived at this circle of shadowy tents near the base of a sand dune that could have buried Trust Academy or Constance Haus or Buckingham Palace and a hundred drunken Santas. The camels sank to their knees and were arranged in a huddle so they could shield each other from the wind and my tourist party and I were led into the main tent as our Berber hosts lit candles and a gold crackling fire and prepared tea and supper.

We ate tagine again, because that's pretty much what you eat in Morocco. All of us, the French tourists and the cool Turkish girls and Timon and I, we all toasted cups of chai tea with the tribesmen, who also didn't speak a word of English, and then we shared a meal like Israelites wandering in the wilderness out there so far from anyone or anything except sand sand sand. The tribesmen played a little music on some mythic looking flute and the Turkish girls shared beers with the French seniors until the cold called us all to the blankets in the other tents.

I left my pack by a bedroll and walked out of camp to pee. There were no barriers or anything for doing your business out there, just a three point six million square mile litter box. It was while walking back to camp, ready for bed, when I looked again up to the gargantuan dune near the tents. I could see the vague silhouette of the dust blowing off of it, ever changing the contours of the thing, picking it up and moving it for miles. Nothing stays the same in the Sahara. It all undulates like the surface of the ocean. I stopped in wonder of the thing and decided I was going to climb to the top of it. I'd been denied mountains in Scotland but I could climb this mountain of sand and see just how deep into the desert we were.

Every foot I gained was a few inches of sliding back down. Nothing stayed under my feet and the wind blew all of the loosened sand into my face, so I was spitting it out of my mouth and blinking it out of my eyes and blindly scrambling slowly up this heap that was so much bigger than I could understand from a distance. I don't know how long it was until I finally collapsed at the top, destroying the peak as I touched it, but I lay there on my back to catch my breath. That's when I saw the stars.

Out there, so far from any light pollution, it was like I'd never seen the sky above me before. There were so many thousands of bright shining bursts of light decorating the resolute blue glow of the Milky Way. Tears filled my eyes as I lay so small on top of that empire of shifting sand looking up at those overpowering suspended memories of starlight.

It was all so beautiful.

It was all so sad.

I stood up to shout something out into the sea that was once mountains and boulders and canyons. I stood up to do some sort of wolf cry to the moon, pulling sand into my lungs as I sucked in a breath. Then I saw the shadow of a great something on the other side of the slope. The shadow looked like an enormous tree trunk, or maybe an ancient column or something, completely alone and tall in the desert. I slid down to investigate.

As I approached the tree trunk, it became obvious that it was, in fact, not a tree trunk at all. It was metal, dully reflecting the stars. As I got closer, slowly, I realized just how tall it really was, rising up maybe thirty feet to a sharp point, now illuminated as a red light began to blink from it. The base had three huge cylinders attached to it, partially sunk in the ground. I thought surely I must be sleeping or having a nervous breakdown because there was nothing that this tower could have been if not a rocket ship.

Spreading apart my fingers, I reached out and touched the cold aluminum. There was a low rumble. The ship began to vibrate. I stumbled backwards as a hydraulic hiss leaked pressurized air out and a curved side panel opened and a ramp extended down towards me. I fell back onto the ground. When the ramp was settled in the sand, the dark silhouette of a dog appeared in the surgical interior light. It moved towards me, with each step growing larger and larger and I had to scramble to my feet to back up. It stepped off the ramp and sat back on its haunches, now barely smaller than the rocket. It yawned, long and lazy, and then rolled its eyes down to look at me.

"Hey," it said with an all too familiar voice. It rumbled deep and loud, even though there was nothing for it to reverberate off of.

"Hi," I said. And suddenly this all wasn't so weird because I knew what was happening. "Are you here to take me to Mars?" I asked.

The dog nodded. "If you want to go. Personally I'd recommend it." The voice was even more powerful than it sounded in my head.

"Why's that?" I asked.

"There's a lot of good answers to that," said the dog. "To start off with, if you stay then you're stuck with me. And your love doctors. Let's face it, they probably make you more miserable than I do. Then there's your long trail of broken relationships. The girls you loved who will never love you again, if they ever did at all. The nothing in your future. I mean come on, Daniel, you're moving to Manitoba. There's nothing for you there. You live away from your family, you don't believe in God half the time but you always pretend to, and whatever went wrong with Adilyn and Aidlyn will keep going wrong for the rest of your life."

I got to my feet. "Why would I listen to you? All you do is make me feel bad and lie to me. You're just a bunch of bad chemicals."

The lumbering beast sank down onto its belly, sending up a cloud of sand. "Depression gets a bad reputation," it said, now low and rumbling louder against the earth. I felt the urge to grab hold of something to be sure I wouldn't fall, but I didn't want to give it the satisfaction. "People want to believe that just because something is sad or violent or cruel that it's less real. It's not though. You know that. Think back about all the lies you've told. 'I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay.' Lies. Every time you told someone how terrible everything is, though, you told the truth. So you tell me, is depression or happiness a more honest emotion?"

"What, so now the whole world is terrible?" I was close to shouting now. I realized that this was because the dog was gradually getting louder. "I mean, it hasn't been awesome for me lately, sure. But that doesn't mean it won't get better."

The dog grinned sadly. "Give up on the Someday, Daniel." He hefted a massive paw and gestured out to everything surrounding us. "Just look! All of this is stuff that used to be but isn't anymore. You can't keep anything here, Daniel. It all goes away, even if you do get lucky and grab hold of it for a second. People love each other and then they don't and they break promises and tell lies and things will never be the way that you want them to be. Everything will hurt you eventually. Everyone you've ever known and ever will know and all the people you won't—one day they will all be gone. But on Mars, they can't hurt you. They'll all be in another world and you'll be alone and happy. No gods, no love, just wonderfully happy sedative. Nothing and no one will ever break your heart again," he said. "So why stay? Why stay here on this flooding earth where you will spend your days being hated or hating yourself or losing the few people who might actually learn to care about you for a second? WHY?" The word echoed out against the sand dune and hit me again from behind with a force like wind, knocking me back down to my knees.

The tears came to my eyes and cleaned streaks in the dirt on my face. I thought about the somedays I wanted that never were and the todays I'd lived but couldn't keep and the yesterdays that had been and never would be again. Finally someone was saying all of the great big black thoughts that I had been hiding from. Finally someone was telling it like it was. "...You're right," I said. "Everything changes. It all hurts so much so much of the time." I remembered back to dragging my bones over the West Highland Way and collapsing each night to the hope of seeing her again somewhere at the end of it all. But she wasn't at the end of it all now. Nothing was.

"You're not a coward for wanting to run, Daniel," said the dog. "They're all cowards for being too afraid to be honest with themselves. They're the cowards for pretending that it's all okay. Just get on the ship. Just disappear."

The panel was wide open, shining that pure light. I got to my feet, shirt whipping out behind me from a new wind, sand blowing up against my face. I covered my eyes with a hand and fought the gust towards the ramp.

"You'll be happy, Daniel. Moment by moment. Being happy is all you'll ever need to think about again. Doesn't that sound wonderful?" The wind swept up into a howl and the sand stung like quick hot hail and I leaned into the weather to press forward. "Almost there!"

Step two three, brace two step, one two grab.

"Agh!" Sideways, back to the ground, I tumbled, a thin hand reaching out from beneath the sand and grabbing my ankle. I felt a heavy tug and then out from underneath, he pulled himself onto his knees. Or his knee anyway. He had a peg leg that began around where his second knee would have once started. He dug himself out quickly, spluttering and coughing as he did. Like a matchstick rising up and approaching an inferno, Wallace heaved himself out. He put a hand on my chest and shot me a severe look before turning, narrow-eyed and seething, to the black mass somewhere hidden behind the fragment whirlwind.

"YOU!" Wallace choked out the word with pieces of sand and jammed a finger at the dog. "YOU KILLED HIM!"

"The liar returns, Daniel! With more lovely noble stories of heroes and villains. Don't listen to him! Just a few more steps."

"SHUT UP!" Wallace screamed up to the creature, his frail bones shaking in the sand blasting torrent. He pulled in a breath to say something but then lost balance. I did a sort of lurch off the ground, catching Wallace from my knees so the two of us were a close huddle against the wind and driving dust. "Daniel, please," he said to me. "I'm so sorry. I know it's all wrong. You shouldn't be out here. I know it's my fault, but please you can't just give up. You can't listen to that THING!" He roared this last word back at the black dog, who remained motionless by the awaiting rocket.

"Wallace, I don't blame you," I said. "I don't blame Jason. We wanted the same things. Obviously. But it's just—it was all for nothing. It all goes away. It's just sand in the wind, driving and stinging and burying everything until it's all the same rolling hills of nothing at all."

"STOP IT!" Wallace screeched again at the dog. "LEAVE HIM ALONE!"

"And what am I supposed to be doing?" The dog's voice was so strong he didn't even have to raise it to rumble over the wind.

"Wallace, I have to go."

"Daniel. Please." There were tears in his eyes as the wind threatened to tear him away and out off into the sky. He kept blinking with the sand and moisture.

"Why? Why stay?"

"You must know by now," said Wallace weakly.

"I don't! I really don't!" I yelled at him, my throat catching. "It's supposed to be this thing we all understand, but not me! What am I sticking around for? What makes all of this worth it? Just give me a reason. Just one piece of evidence for why I should keep fighting when I know I'm always going to lose!"

"I'VE GOT ONE RIGHT HERE!"

Off to the left, stumbling through the chaos, came the hard sinking, slow steps of a man with a bandana covering both his eyes and a piece of paper clenched in his hand.

"JASON!?" Wallace tried to stand but fell back to the ground.

Jason ran over to him and felt around for his arms so he could hoist him to his feet and prop him up.

"Thought a little enucleation could keep me from tugging on our boy's heartstrings?" asked Jason.

"Are you blind?"

"Yeah, Wallace. After all... isn't that what love's meant to be?"

Wallace wrapped his arms around his friend. "You are The Stallion," he said into his ear.

"Damn right," he said. "Now! Where is he?"

The Stallion marched himself and Wallace through the sand back toward me.

"Give me your hand," he said. So I did. In it, he put his piece of paper. It had these words written on it:

There was a second tree.

"Are we done with the theatrics yet?" rumbled the black dog.

"Yeah." I said to him. "We are." I mounted the ramp.

"Daniel, what are you doing?" Wallace called out.

Step by step I moved toward the white light. I could feel the electric heat emanating from the entrance.

"I'm sorry, Daniel!" cried The Stallion. "I'm sorry we failed you!" Then I stopped. Halfway up. I was now level with the black dog's eyes.

"There were two trees!" I raised my voice up as mighty as it could be, small as it was. "And God said not to eat, but we ate from the first one. That's why it all sucks! That's why it hurts! Because we CHOSE to not believe! We called His bluff and we've been hurting each other ever since! BUT THERE WAS A SECOND TREE!" I roared louder than in the closet or on the highway or behind the welding mask or in the tea room or under the bridge. Then, suddenly, I realized that I didn't need to raise my voice at all. "And the greatest mercy of God," I said, "is that He kicked us out and locked the door before we could eat that fruit too. Because that was the tree of life. And if we had eaten the fruit from the tree of life, then we would've lived forever."

"That's what you want," said the dog. "Something to last forever."

"Not this!" I gestured as he had to the endless sand. "The fact that me and you and everyone I've ever loved and never loved will die is the greatest possible thing. Because it means that we don't have to stay here on this drowning earth. That's what I want. Not someday, not now, forever. The Forever that means that all of these things that will become dust are part of a mountain that won't just grind down to sand."

"Ask yourself," said the dog in his calm rumbling voice. "Do you really believe that? Or is it just another lie you're telling yourself?"

I looked back to Wallace and The Stallion. I thought back to Jon and the pants and my parents and all those missionaries at Truth Academy. I thought about Aidlyn wanting to know how to love more deeply. I thought about the cabin that had met me as I was about to lost hope in the woods, and the friends who had found me, desperate and penniless, in Amsterdam, and Paul and my K group and Gabriel taking me aside out of unsolicited love. About Jordahl letting us burn things and Jackson and trees and fire butts.

"I really really do," I said. "And when you think about that... it's really a beautiful thing that we get to feel these brief warm flashes as we wait in the rain for change to make us infinite. But they aren't the point. These moments. So thanks for the offer, but my ride's coming later."

I descended the ramp, the dog spewing insistent lies in the back of my head and my ambitious inner romantic and relationship manager slow clapping as the space ship and the dog and both of them became the last gust of sandy wind blowing off to be a dune somewhere in my crazy crazy brain, leaving me still and quiet in the darkness of the Sahara.

Back in my tent, I crawled into a bedroll and laid down against the earth, which sped miles around the sun with each passing second, taking me off into unwritten chapters, but not as the person I once was.

Manitoba

"I'm not letting you go out dressed like that."

My across-the-hall neighbor, Key pulled me into his dorm room and told me to take off my clothes.

"What's wrong with my suit?"

"You look like a pillowcase, man. Here, put these on."

That's how I came to be dressed in a five hundred dollar Korean suit instead of my potato sack garments when my drama instructor Shevaun pulled up in Yoda, her poor, limping automobile, still puttering after the last of its kind had died out. She was only a few years older than me but somehow it seemed she was running half of Agape College University's theater program there in Manitoba.

We were going to a gala event at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Most of my Manitoba life did not involve gala events or orchestras or going anywhere alone with single ladies for that matter. Most of my Manitoba life was spent huddling inside away from the cold. I can't use adjectives to describe Manitoba cold because if I used one I would also have to use every one of its synonyms to even begin to describe just how unpleasant it really was. Jackson had been spot on, Manitoba was a pretty lousy place. He hadn't, however, informed me that it was also home to some pretty spectacular people.

I hadn't seen Aidlyn since the last hug on the last day at the bottom of Germany. That was a year ago by the time I was cruising in Yoda down the straight-for-miles highway up to the city of Winnipeg. I'd like to say that I was completely out of love with her at that point, but that just wouldn't be accurate. I thought about her all the time. I still found myself stopping to double take when I passed the back of a rusty blonde head, always thinking I might bump into her someplace. I guess I was still hoping for that magic movie moment.

—

shwaaaaa shwaa shwaaaa shweee

bum! bum!

wuuuuuuuum... wummeeeeeeeee wummmm

...and so on. That's more or less what the orchestra sounded like. We sat and listened to the performance and I felt cool in my fancy suit with the $300 watch that Key had insisted I wear. After we got to the bit where we stood and clapped for all of the talented people, we went to the gala part of the event, which was cocktails up on the second floor.

"So how much money do you make at your job?" I asked one of Shevaun's sophisticated adult friends. I knew as I said it that it was poor social grace but I'd also kind of become more okay with the fact that I said things in poor social grace most of the time. I discovered that you could be forgiven of pretty much anything if you just kept asking questions and appearing interested. Well, I guess I hadn't discovered that, but I'd learned it anyway. The guy I was talking to was still formulating a response when a finger tapped my shoulder with an, "Ahem."

I turned around and there she was. There she was in a beautiful dress and her resolute blue eyes and rusty blonde hair and her nose ring and right cheek only freckles. I looked at her. I opened my mouth. I looked to Shevaun's sophisticated adult friend. I closed my mouth. I opened my mouth. I looked to Aidlyn. I looked to Shevaun's friend again.

"I don't... understand what's happening here," said the guy.

"Don't worry about it, I've got this," said Aidlyn.

He sauntered off and she joined me at my cocktail table. I spun a shrimp around in a cup with no intention of eating it, or perhaps even of eating anything ever again if she kept standing there staring at my forehead waiting for me to look up.

"So, if you were going to start a conversation right now..."

"I'm Daniel," I said. My heart beat fast like the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's kettle drums. "Foutz," I added. I guess just because I liked the sound of my own name.

"Oh hello there, Daniel, I'm Aidlyn. It's nice to meet you." She reached out and took my hand and shook it.

Things got a little less awkward after that. She told me about her job working at a local radio station and doing write ups of music events in the city (hence the gala). She told me about her university and how it was a big change from hoidy toidy conservative Constance Haus. She told me about her new boyfriend and becoming a new person again and realizing that she did not have superpowers, which I still wasn't entirely convinced was true. I told her about how I was teaching dance to high schoolers and the play I'd just been in and all the usual suspect small talk topics.

I caught flashes of the past when she said the word, "hashteg" and did the motion. We had a moment where we both touched fingers to our noses and said, "ginau" at the same time. I met some of her friends and I was happy to be dressed in the nicest clothes I've ever worn. All of those things happened. Then we said goodbye. And do you know what? I don't remember how we did it. I don't remember if we hugged or if she hugged and I put out a palm for a handshake or what. I don't remember a lot of details about the encounter apart from the initial shock of seeing her like an old ghost. We said goodbye and it was nice enough and Shevaun and I walked away and clambered into Yoda and drove back towards school.

"I'm so sorry," said Shevaun. "That must have been really uncomfortable for you."

"It wasn't so bad," I said. Though my heart was beating fast and some thoughts chased around in my brain and Wallace and The Stallion would have to do a little bit of dog obedience magic to keep the emulsion settled as evenly as possible and I'd probably still wind up listening to Winnie the Pooh late at night or jogging barefoot in the snow or something.

"Oh, whoah!" Shevaun pulled Yoda to a spluttering stop on the side of the infinite flat dirt road and she got out into the night air.

"Where are you going?"

"Come look!" she called back.

I had been cold before the car door was opened, but I remembered Scotland and that nothing could be as bad as that and I plunged my fancy Korean suited self out into the freezing night. Shevaun stood in her heels where the grassy shoulder ended and the dead cornfield began, head tilted up to the sky. There above her were the pink and green dancing waves of the Northern Lights, bright against the big empty sky. I watched the beautiful mixing colors and felt the miserable biting cold and thought the confusing soup of thoughts in my brain.

One

Something I forgot to mention about the Binky story.

Two

After that night with the bashing my head against the door and crying?

Three

The next day I got up, and walked downstairs to where my parents were eating breakfast.

Four

They asked, "Are you okay?"

Five

And, if my mother is to be trusted, I looked up and smiled.

Six

And I said, "Binky, all gone!"

I held in that last breath, staring up at the dancing light of the universe, for one final second. In that second a hundred lightning bolts struck the earth as it hurtled eighteen and a half miles through space. Four people were born, one died, 41,000 updated their Facebook statuses, and a guy named Bill Gates made two hundred and fifty dollars. Couples had first kisses and last ones, and humans around the world laughed and cried and at least one somebody somewhere in our corner of the universe had their heart completely broken.

Seven

Every now again, even after those final seven breaths, I still found myself in love with Aidlyn. But only for thirty seconds. Just long enough to remember that as warm as a fire in a damp cabin may be, it's nothing compared to that place somewhere just past the mountains.

