End of November. I battle the inner and outer solitude I encounter in this conurbation of nine million Chicagoans. I call no one. No one calls me. Loneliness seems my night job. I work out at the gym to battle the isolation.
At the health club, I allow the spaceship bank of big screen TV’s to mesmerize me. I permit the svelte blonds on the cyclical machines to lure my mind from its lonely perch. I find myself thinking: Why don’t they hook all the elliptical machines to a giant battery and generate power for this place? My mind wanders. My legs, running in place, need to wander, too. I escape Planet Fitness for Planet Earth.
It’s rained for days. The clouds chalk the sky in a turbid, pastel scrawl, draping my eyes with a dreamy, comforting sadness. In sweats and work out shoes, I trudge out into the wind driven rains and head for the woods.
Glistening oak leaf that covers the forest floor. I go to my bank, 12 feet above the fast-swelling creek, and stand on that muddy ledge overlooking a tongue of land around which the river carves its gooseneck. The thin headland had been a wide peninsula just a week ago. Today, a new leg of the river decides to trespass, crosscutting the tongue in half and taking a shortcut to other side of the gooseneck.
Guess you can’t escape being a river once you are. If you’re a river, it doesn’t matter how long it takes you to get to the end of yourself, wherever that is. You’re still part of that same channel. Water is water and all water heads in the same direction. It all rushes headlong or wanders in lassitude toward the same sea. That inexorable drive of water to meet itself in its great ocean, to mix with its whole self, regardless of the route it takes to get there or its speed or even the form it assumes when it greets itself in the sea. Those things don’t make a lick of spit to the sea who receives you. So take a short cut. Get ahead of yourself. It doesn’t matter. If you part from yourself and choose to take the course across the land, you’ll meet yourself again in what seems like serendipity, but in what’s just the natural rejoining of an old knowing. Everything that parts from itself rejoins.
I’m getting pounded by the cold rains. The scrawny crowns of ash trees sway in the wind in an unintentional mimicry of African dance. My inner ear, the victim of North Side alley nights in the winter drinking beer, aches from its old frostbitten history.
Go back to Planet Fitness and the hot sculpted bods and the 24-hour newsfeeds and football—
But the forest draws me in like the main channel pulls on its tributaries. I stare up the shoulders of a naked black oak. Its limb, jarred by wind, sweeps a fat tear into my eye. Smaller buckthorn, still green-leaved, wear white jewels of rain like Holiday decorated trees. The thick copper rug of oak leaves entices me further in. I feel the simultaneous urges to sleep in the leaf litter and swim in it.
Rains rinse through me as if I, sponge-like, absorb their embrace in my sinews, as the cold, clear water squeezes into and out of my pores, soaks me like the mossy earth. Every organ and thought inside me are permeated with its chilled, cleansing breath, the drenched gusts like a virgin storm untouched by any stolid thing. I need this wet forest to breathe. I need this aloneness to connect with myself. I’ll just lose little parts of myself back in Planet Fitness every time I cast a glance at a million-dollar mansion on big screen TV. If I accidentally graze the shoulder of a bedroom community beauty, a little bit of soul will cleave off. And soon, there won’t be much of me. It’s here I recover those split off drops of myself.
I wander further onto the floodplain and rub shoulders with a moss oak as I spin aimlessly, my face toward the mortared sky, drunk with rain. I unload myself of the burden of serving a God which my mother and Sister and Father instructed me in long ago. I do not ask what His will is for me. I just live instead. And in living, I abrogate my duty to a Santa Claus who rewards and withholds turns.
Finally, I’m cleansed of urban iniquity. Old oaks on the other side of the wide, drowning stream fall two together, husband and wife, with a crown of decayed leaves their common vow. I tumble into a bevy of does and yearlings. Our eyes meet, their black glass wary and watchful as their jaws mulch fresh shoots poking through the duff of leaf and acorn.
I squeeze out of the thicket and onto the road, and patter back into the parking lot of Planet Fitness. The soles of my shoes are cleaner now than when I went outside.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within