Drew sits in a forest. There was a time that they were here before, but that is gone and it is impossible for them to recollect it. Recollect — re-collect — collected on their phone; they scroll through their photos until they prove that they were here five months ago, that they wore their flannel-lined jeans that may have been stained, or maybe not.
The memory itself lays a second away from Drew, a half-life away, always denigrating beyond their fingers. In this moment they’ve decided to take advantage of the reappeared sunlight, which has been leaving sooner and sooner. The air is bitter and smells sharp, and the grass beneath them crunches when they sit. Crunches like a bone — once they had broken a finger, they had the x-rays, but the pain was gone, leaving only the image of a doctor unwrapping the splint from their finger, bending it back and forth, squeezing the knuckle. Maybe it had hurt. They assume it did.
They were here before, but they couldn’t remember the reason. Perhaps it was like today, when they thought it was a nice day and took a walk, but it couldn’t have been spontaneous. The forest was far from home and far from busy. The aloneness leaves their skin in a cold sweat, sticking their t-shirt to their back like hands gluing down paper-mache. The last time were here, they’d also had the feeling of their lungs being cleaned dry to nothingness. Although they can’t remember the circumstances, they know the feeling, only because of its present repetition. To ignore the eerieness of being alone, they’d kept their phone on in their periphery. It was reassuring, like it is now.
They have a few theories about what they’d been doing the last time they came here:
- They’d gotten bitten by mosquitoes, all up their legs until they scratched one scab so roughly that it left a permanent little scar under their knee. They can lift up their jean leg to look at it now.
- They’d gone on a date with a girl who was a bit taller than they’d expected and a bit too talkative, so instead of taking her back to their apartment and making her tea (which was, as everyone knew, the perfect way to start making out, before Drew would panic and shove her out of the apartment, blocking her on Hinge and hoping nothing would spread through the local queer circles about her blushing, barely-repressed guilt), they went to the forest, and Drew wondered if a change of scenery could be the key to preventing their panic, but their date smelled weird and when they leaned forward to kiss they leaned backwards into the ground.
- They’d done some reading, maybe Nabokov’s Pnin, and once they got to the princely section, they started to doubt if their own father was theirs, which was absurd, because they had the same chin and blood pressure issues, and besides, if there was any evidence for an elusive, estranged father, what would they care? But they panicked and left nonetheless.
They were unsure which was right, or if any was right, or if they were all right. Correctness was subjective, anyhow; if they thought hard enough, they could cement any one of the fantasies into fact and remember searching the name of their date, or parents infidelity:reddit.com, or homemade treatments for mosquito bites.
They kept scrolling on their phone. A bird chirped high in the tree near them. The tree was green, was green the last time they came, would be green if they returned. It was no indicator of time. They kept scrolling.
Writer | Merrick Lawson ’25 | mlawson25@amherst.edu
Editor | Mackenzie Dunson ’25 | mdunson25@amherst.edu