Newfoundland

We put our seed in the ground and buried a body, but the land gave us nothing in return for the price we paid for it, for the weight of the earth that we piled onto someone who was our own. And after such a loss, what else did we expect? We wandered through our own house. Front door impossible, backyard a stranger. Attempted to communicate with others in a language we no longer spoke. The ache inside us was no surprise, especially when it bled out into our everyday lives, venting through cracks and fractures. We pretended we had nothing left to lose, although we were wrong about that, of course. I lost you in the wet heat outside Atlanta, stuck in traffic, while you fussed with the air conditioner. We were both scorched and empty, like a kettle screaming on a burner as the water boils off into steam. You were sorry, and I was sorry, and I said goodbye so I didn’t have to feel sorry all the time.

I rode trains north, carried along as if on a fast river. Seven hundred miles with a paperback thriller someone had forgotten, interrupted only by the announcements of miscellaneous towns. I abandoned the train in Washington, and I hurried down the National Mall, ignoring monuments dedicated to wars and wars and murder. Things were better in Baltimore, with pit beef on a kaiser and greasy fingers, a calm looseness blooming in my head. The nights were becoming easier. I was sleeping past dawn again. In Philadelphia, I looked five years younger, and although I wasn’t the person I used to be, I pretended to be that person, if only for a minute.

I was content with life in motion, suspended halfway between leaving and arriving. In Manhattan, I waded through trapped heat to Penn Station. I was excited by the idea of Providence, something that was absent from me and that I longed for. At Providence Station, I asked about beaches and how to get there, and I swam in chest-high surf. Rolling waves, one after another, the water full of stringy, rust-colored seaweed that reminded me of swimming in hair. The forest in Maine was silent in October, the floor cushioned with spent pine needles. A woman warned me about bears, and when to run, and when to puff up and yell. Sprays of steam from a teakettle on a cabin stove in thin, cold air. A reoccurring dream of Atlanta shook me from my stupor. I missed you constantly. How far away could I get from you? Where was the opposite of you? The road was the arrow of a compass pointing north.

Whenever people asked questions, I’d gesture behind me and make something up. Any other past was preferable to my own. I had a degree in history, so I was a professional. I could invent any past that I wanted. Where was I from? What work did I do? Phoenician trader, Mesopotamian brewer, goat herding on the steppe. But not from here. From anywhere, everywhere else.

I started walking. Sometimes, I dropped off the road and slept in a ditch—days of sore feet and police with questions. I bought boots and winter clothes in Augusta. Miles of blisters. Frost on gravel shoulders. Loaves of sandwich bread smeared with peanut butter. Instant noodles cooked with hot tap water. The life of economy, with each step creating a debt inside myself that I had no means of repaying. I was spending the part of me that I couldn’t hope to earn back. Poorer after every next minute, but always another mile, and a mile after that.

There was a sickness that got in me as I continued north. I began to slow down. Christmas Eve in a coffee shop, eavesdropping on two elderly men. Years spent together, their families raised as neighbors, each of them planted in the soil of their community eighty years earlier. As they talked, I was missing my own roots, which were gone. Then the old shits made racist comments about our server after she refilled the coffee cups. I fortified my coffee with cream and sugar for the extra calories, savored the hot nectar, and I was jealous. They had somewhere to go. People waiting for them.

Put a body in the ground, walk to Canada and find myself still on the same earth, as if on a treadmill, no further than where I started from.

I dreamed of you in a park with our girl, and a wind that thrashed the branches overhead and whipped your hair around. Maybe it would rain, or maybe not. “Should we go?” That’s what you asked me.

I couldn’t see our girl because you were in the way.

I was in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, flossing my teeth. I had a look in the mirror, and I thought: Goddamn, aren’t you a mess? You look terrible.

But I was flossing my teeth. I was trying. The awful parts of me were trying to become better again.

Along the coast of Nova Scotia, waves pounded the beach and raked tumbling, small stones out on the recede. I was sitting cross-legged, hands tucked in my pockets, my head churning and busy. My heart no longer hard, but heavy, living in the pit of my stomach. New Brunswick to Quebec, over the St. Lawrence and north to Newfoundland. I liked the sound of Newfoundland.

In the dead weeks before real spring, I was raw and hungry. Lips and fingertips chapped and cracked. My boots sank in mud and I worried about my feet, trying to look after them with pairs of hand-washed socks while I begged the sun overhead for warmth.

Cold mornings. Foggy, shrouding, unwelcome icy rains.

All the way to the horizon if we can, if we let ourselves, if we’re doing it right, and then we turn around.