Chapter III: Twin Lakes–Michigan

You’re the only one I don’t have to explain any of this to—it’s seared in both of us.

The manipulation, the lies, the bullying, the stalking, all the times he pit us against each other. The way he pushed us until we screamed and ran. Trapped, yearning for freedom. 

And yet, there there were days so joyous that life felt like a waking dream. 

No one ever taught us about this.
Friends who can love each other this deeply;
men who can become so determined to see each other burn.

To me, you’re the only one who knows this kind of scar.

After him, you move to Chicago to escape the haunting of our childhood.

In the years that follow, we go to our two lakes over and over and over. 

Lake Michigan: in your new home, where the waves teach us the rhythm of healing.

And Lake Tuscarora: back in Barnesville, where we learn how to befriend our ghosts. 

*****

August 31, 2018: Our first day together in your new house in the Chicago suburbs

Before this room, I’d never felt like I was coming home to a place I’ve never been. I sit with the light of the moon spilling over onto the bed, crickets chirping, I listen to the sounds of the evening and the early mornings and contemplate my luck. This first night in the dark, buzzed off too many porters, dizzily swaying in the blue, I longingly stare at the sheets in the dim, emptiness merged with awe. And I wonder: How have we stayed close through all the years of uncertainty and change? How did we get here, you in Chicago and me back east? Though far away, we grow in parallel, not apart. You’ve got a mortgage now, have had one since 22; you’re getting your MBA at UChicago. You told me both of these things at once back home and I punched you hard on the shoulder out of shock.

I’m still in awe of the way we’re so different but managed to stay so close for a decade. Now you live alone with a house with two bedrooms: when I escape there from NYC I imagine you seeing it for the first time, imagine you at the showing, thinking of all the people who will find solace here. A home that you dreamt up for us all after so many years of us all feeling lost. That first visit, you say to me you’re thankful for me, and I remember looking at you and wondering how I even would begin to explain to you how much gratitude I felt.

So I sit here in this room, listening to the morning, watching the light cascade across the blinds and in the buzzing sounds I replay all the wildness that has led us here; to you living here, this home; to us being so strong; to us being so much better.

September 5, 2019: The week we drove all the way around Lake Michigan

You’re blowing on the fire. My eyes are closed. You inhale. When you exhale I can see the light intensify from behind my eyes. Each time the light grows, something flashes. Huagh. Him and I dancing in the moonlight. Hoooh. He’s coming on to me and I tell him to stop, tell him he doesn’t have me like that anymore. Haaagh. The red flashes strong. I’m seeing what happens if I never tell him to stop.

Branches crackle, you breathe. He would kiss me. He’d give me what I’d always wanted. But it was too late. I had awoken to the truth of things. Haaaaa... the fire is growing huge, I can feel the strength of it heating us all up. Hoooh. I’m running through an empty field with tears in my eyes. Huagh. Then his Grandmom’s porch at 17, he says: I used to hate you, but now you’re all I see.

When the fire dies and you’ve downed a few beers, you’re stumbling to your tent. But then I call to you, Wait!

What is it? You OK?

Goodnight. And for the only time on the whole trip, I reach out my arms to you, one high, one low, and I hug you tight. The smell of bonfire is coalescing from me to you. You hug tighter, and we stay for ten long seconds, there with each other, hugging for three rises and falls of our chests. I am back to when we were young and the air was heavy with freedom, when the nights always ended like this. With the reminder that someone has you, someone’s got you. 

That next morning we’re driving and I’m sitting in the middle seat and you put your arm around me. I lean my head back into your shoulder.

Just friends—brothers, really. A touch that doesn’t mean anything.

And yet it means everything. 

September 6, 2019:

We camp by the waterfront, walk six miles out to the precipice, then came the flash floods. We hike those six miles back in the pouring rain, thunder booming on as we run back to the car from the cliffs of white sand. Lightning strikes and strikes, and water drips off the soaked brim of my hat. Bloodshot eyes, contacts stinging, I blindly hold my arms out to the woods—for three miles, no sight.

I follow your voice for two hours of nothingness. Climbing over roots and reeds. Knowing you are somewhere there in front of me. I am beginning to learn something at Lake Superior this day of the storm: about myself, about what a decade can give you and what it can take, about what things we are still learning how to mourn.

I come here to the Lakes to see you every year now, to let go of the home behind us, and always to build a new one. To learn again how to move through life without always needing to know. To learn to trust that voice, the one you have to learn to follow blindly, between the dim and the dark.

September 7, 2019, the day after the roadtrip ends; dusk

Huge murmurations of birds are flying south across the darkening sky and you’re revving the engine of your bike. You tell me to hold on to you. Tentative, I clasp my hands together against your abdomen. Heavy rain clouds collect and linger across dark blue. Trees are blurs and our helmets bump each other every time you slow.

I think of him and ask myself how much he wants to be right here, where I sit. His legs slipped into yours just like mine are now. And I’m thinking how it crossed my mind on this trip that there is a part of me that wants to leave you go, that cannot reconcile the things about you that I don’t understand, the things that might hurt me. When we turn onto the highway, you rev fast & I feel like I might fall back into the middle of the road. I clutch harder.

But as the wind pushes tears past my eyelids, I’m thinking: How can I ever let you go? You know all of if, you saw everything. You’re the only one. Sometimes I have to try so hard to get you to understand me. But I would search for the words to translate me to you a million times over, try to cross the borders of our worlds that our lives build between us. I can fight and argue and get mad and get filled with rage but still love you because at the end of the day, you see me and you love me. Because of you, I know how to heal.

And so here I am. I’m holding on.