Keep Your Eyes Up

'Keep your eyes up,' he says, 'you'll miss it.' His words snap me out of reverie. I hadn't even realized he'd been watching me. I lift my eyes and sweep them over the cold, dusky landscape in front of us. Night is falling. Winter is coming, I can feel it in the air. He's tall, taller than I am, broad shouldered and steady. I feel safe and comfortable in his physical presence. So comfortable, I often drift off and get lost in myself. Tonight, he's brought me out bear hunting and we are now walking quietly up a deserted logging road and deeper into the dank evening woods.

His only words of the evening strike me, 'Keep your eyes up.' "That's what I'm gonna title my first book," I whisper to him, "Keep Your Eyes Up, You'll Miss It." He holds up a finger, my signal to be quiet. I fall into line behind him and fix my eyes on his back. His sandy brown hair pokes slightly from beneath the beanie he wears. He carries a gun and a backpack, both slung over his broad shoulders. The woods are holy to him. I get the feeling that he is in tune here, that this is one of the few places in his life he feels like he fits. I often think he missed his generation -- he should've been a frontiersmen. He should've lived off the land. He should've built a log cabin with his hands and spent his days alone in the misty mountains on the back of a horse just as solid and steady and pensive as he, while his dogs puffed along softly at his side.

He should've lived in a time less vivid, more black and white. Maybe he would've done better back then. Here, he has problems. Here, he can't get much to agree with him. Here, he often doesn't quite fit. He's lost everything, recently. He works three jobs and still can't afford to live. His house is about to go to the bank. His face has begun to look older than it is. His wife and beautiful infant daughter left him and moved back east. His wife can be mentally unstable sometimes and he worries about the baby. I've seen him cry silently about it. He spends long hours on the phone with her, staring sadly off into the distance while her angry voice pours out of the receiver and into his battered brain. I keep to myself while he has these conversations. She knows I am here, but there is no need to amplify my presence. I do my best to disappear.

Eventually, he will hang up, walk silently outside where he will sit on a log and let his head hang heavy in his hands. Times like that, I know well enough to not go right out. He doesn't need me, not like that, he never has. I watch him from the kitchen window and his sadness travels through the dusk and up to me. It's cold outside, the ground is frozen beneath his feet and all the trees have dropped their leaves. There is snow in the mountains and winter in the air but he does not shiver.

Eventually I will go downstairs, go to the door, let the light from inside the house filter out around my body and I will softly say his name. He will stand, come to me. I will hug his cold body to my warm one and he will rest his chin on the top of my head. We will go inside together. What we have is simple -- it's one of the only things that is, anymore. We are fundamentally the same - two people with the same internal make up, blankly and silently afloat. We drifted into one another, smiled softly, and now continue to drift along together, taking solace in the comfort and the familiarity of someone beached by the same tides.

His wedding pictures still decorate the mantle. His wife is strikingly beautiful. When he is not home, I take one of the photos down and stare into her face. Some days, I am jealous of what she has. I've heard about the 'other woman' and how the incumbent wife always has the real power, but I never believed it, not until now.

The house is small and the baby was only a few months old when they left. In the bedroom, his wife has painted a mural. Chubby bumble bees and butterflies flit around the walls and up toward the high ceilings, dancing over five flowers with faces. The faces are labeled, "Mommy, Daddy." There are also flowers for the baby and each of the two dogs. Every flower has a small, framed picture, every flower except the 'Mommy' flower. I finally had to take that picture down last week.

It's not only the bedroom. Everything in the house is exactly as his wife left it. In many ways, she never left at all. She is still here and I feel her every day. Everywhere I move in this house, I feel the evidence of a life -- a wedding, a baby, a sweet little cabin in the mountains, years spend in constant company. I feel footsteps that are far too broad and deep for me to fill. Up until a few days ago, her clothes still hung in the closet. The dresser on her side of the bed holds half-finished projects, blank scrapbook pages, journals and photos. I do not move anything. I dust over her books, I wipe the baby's little toys down, straighten the blankets in the crib. I often feel as if I am in a burial site where the placement of every small stone is sacred. Somewhere deep inside of myself, I know I do not belong here. I know these artifacts are not my own.

We have delved into the dark of the woods now, and damp leaves pad our steps. He walks carefully, chooses his footsteps with incredible precision. He keeps his eyes up. I do my best to follow him, looking down at my feet in order to place them in the same spots as his. Often I snap a twig or slap my boot down heavily on a rock. I know he hears me and I know how important it is to him that we stay silent but he does not glance back. There is no anger. He also knows that we will not shoot a bear tonight, it's too late in the season. He knows we will, most likely, not even see a bear. But that is not important to him. All that is important is this silence. These wet woods. The sharp tinge of winter in the cold evening air. All that matters is the meditative walk in a long straight line, going nowhere, looking vaguely for something.

I wonder why he brought me along. This is so intimate for him and each of us is fundamentally alone in our own thoughts tonight, anyway. Something inside of me tells me this is an apology. He knows I have lost my stillness, just like he has. He knows I am tired. He can see it in my eyes. He knows the truth just like I do. He knows that, together, we are transient. These woods are his form of meditation, of prayer. Maybe, in introducing me to them, he is trying to fix me because he knows his human hands cannot. He knows, right now, his human hands are not fit to hold me, but moreover, he knows that neither of us is willing to admit that. He knows that nobody wants to look that deep because, on the surface, we have found momentary rest.

That evening, we go home together and start a fire in the small woodstove. I make a simple dinner and by the time it is ready, he is asleep on the couch, snoring gently. I look down at him and feel in my bones how weary he is. I want to cry, but somehow I blink it back. I do not like for him to see any tears. I know he does not need that. I lay my hand on his shoulder and he wakes with a start.

Later, in bed, after he falls asleep, I lay quietly and take in his face. I memorize him, the way he moves, the pained way he breathes at night -- as if even then he cannot find peace from himself. I look down at where my hand rests within his and I smile because I know, in many ways, he needs me. Although there is immense sadness between us, there is also incredible tenderness. I think of the woods, the damp leaves fallen from the trees that now pad the forest floor as they begin to return to the earth, the mist lacing the crown of the pines, the rhythm of our footfall. I think of the wedding photos on the mantle, the crib in the corner, the flower-faces on the wall, and my clothes tucked neatly in the closet. I think of his voice, "Keep your eyes up. You'll miss it."