Epilogue: Tuscarora
1.
I dream once that the moon has fallen away from Tuscarora.
You and I step in the pitch black, kicking the snow with our boots, smirking to ourselves, barely able to see our hands. We walk from a meadow, past rows of tall grass and the Private Property signs lining the trees and onto the docks.
Wordless, you and I behold black water. How did we not know back then, that this is the last place the three of us would ever be together?
For a moment, from the sky of a new moon, no light shines upon the world. The lake makes no sound.
After years of confusion and fear, he is gone. So are the tides.
Emboldened, we walk deep into the still water, convinced that the cycle has been broken.
2.
Every winter my mind gets stuck back here, goes to this place in my memory, suspended, life on hold. No matter how far I’ve gone from it, I always drive back to the lake, or find myself closing my eyes to remember the first snowfall over the mountain roads.
Sometimes it’s the smell of gasoline, cinders, burning feathers that comes over me when I see fire, or the sight of blood that reminds me you had crimson on your boots and somehow it felt like family.
Sometimes in hunting season, a gunshot in the distance would bring me to the day you all let the turkey loose—you went running with your shotgun, carried its body back over your shoulders, behind you a trail of red all through the woods.
With each sudden flashback, I realize even more so just how much I never knew, never would have guessed, that the Poconos would become like a cornerstone. The hills I’d always wander, full of ghosts, a reflection of a self I can lose so easily, a self I sometimes forget is inside of me.
I know we all live here still, in a way, and sometimes I get the feeling that we all are returning back to the places we left one another. Driving back to feel the lake water beneath the ice again. Walking through the cities we live in now and seeing birds fly across the sky: remembering how the murmurations would punch through the freezing silence.
Sometimes between the fog and the snow I ask myself: do you come back here, to where we were, seven years ago now? Do you drive back like me, and, do you remember everything? Because I can feel that you were just there before. That you still come back like me, to remember—and to forget—what we lost.
For the rest of my life, I will drive these roads over and over and over — remembering the blood that felt like my blood.
Will you remember too?
3.
Sometimes we meet here
in a place only we can remember.
We never arrive at the same time,
But always I can feel you’ve been here again—
Sometimes, some Autumn, the leaves
ascend off the trees; whispers of grief,
tornadoes of crimson, golden rage.
I let them surround me:
surrender to their gales. There
I ask his ghost: Do you still
walk these shores where I last saw you?
Sometimes, snow drifts over Tuscarora.
I stand on her banks in quiet awe
and wonder how it would feel to be
enraptured by the tide — how it would feel to
plunge beneath the ice — how it would feel to
wash away this fire
that seems to want to erase me
from inside
Sometimes my feet get trapped
this ten year sediment —
this imprint of you.
What would it mean to become myself?
What—and who—would I have to lose?
Sometimes when my bare hands touch that lake,
I run the cold water over my face as if
it might cleanse me
of everything.
Sometimes I forget
all of it. In one of those stupors, some August,
the sun shines down on the water.
It’s up to my chest;
the summer sunlight is dancing
on the little waves. I feel a spirit
in its blinding,
telling me to stop time,
