I have a memory that doesn’t belong to me: my father and I, walking in the woods of my hometown when I was small. Looking up, I stopped and said, “Forest Grew!” That was from Where the Wild Things Are: Max watches plants and trees spring up from the floor in his bedroom. The outside grew inside. For me, the forest grew in the room of my skull and I was forever changed.
The place implants itself within you, so indelibly that you don’t realize it until years later and you are doing the sad sifting work of separating yourself out from everything else, trying to untangle yourself from the threading roots of the Forest Grew. You don’t know yet that it is an impossible task and you will only get yourself more mired in confusion as you try, and if you believe in what you are doing I don’t know if you’re getting smarter or stupider. Maybe both.
But when I was little, even then I didn’t love the sun; my sister and I cried and cried in the backseat of my mother’s car when it came out, and we’d put our weak baby hands up and whine and shake our heads in protest, and she, frantic and distracted, would say okay—okay! We’re turning up here, and the sun will go away, just wait for me to turn—!
My favorite times were when it was dark and misted green, when I felt closer to the Forest Grew than any other time—my father put me on his shoulders and took a great pair of shears with long handles and we would go out into the garden at night where he would slice slugs in half. I leaned with his shoulders, and when he set me down my bare feet sank into the ground. I squatted with a flashlight to examine the slugs’ oozing guts, their slowly curling bodies.
Winter nights were not often white and if they were they turned quick, the sweet leaves underneath rotting until they became black sludge that stayed for months. We traveled through the thick damp twilight as through outer space, through the physical cold, pinpricks of rain unbearably sharp on exposed cheeks—traveling through the green-black wet before dipping into the dry warmth in a friend’s home, their burgundy and tan walls, shoes off in the mudroom and then socked feet on kitchen tile—and the ever-constant awareness that this was just a pocket respite, a little haven world in a dark wet universe.
In the spring there were always handfuls of earthworms slipping between my fingers, pulled from the sable loam of the worm-bin compost—that fresh and nourishing rot for to put on the garden and feed the Forest Grew. The worms ate their way through that rot in a sightless world, their purpose clear.
In college, in the little canyon on campus, I encountered muck ponds, still pools teaming with the processes of living things, warm and fetid with their own makings. Lampreys came back to the streams one year, long bodies hidden in the sandy bottom. The rain made everything overflow and run cold and liquid, including me.
Yes, an open sky always felt too exposed. I spent overcast nights wandering under pools of streetlight, thinking about dark slimy things moving below—tangling up in my own insides, sliding against the slimy dark parts of my brain matter. And that felt like home. Later, I sat outside at night under those trees, near a little bridge, and the stream that ran under it covered the sound of my crying because the boy I loved didn’t love me back, and because I didn’t know what to do about the dark wet churning inside me, the movement of something I couldn’t see, a childhood digesting, fermenting into something else.