The forest begins sparse. There’s a crunch under my feet with every step. This time of year, people don’t really come out here, so the snow is evenly spread. Makes it hard to follow the path, but I used to walk this trail all the time with my parents as a kid, so I don’t have to think about it. The pine trees tower overhead, and the sky is clear. I see Orion poking through, just over the horizon. Orion famously died for love. He loved a Goddess and Zeus struck him down for it. He’s my favourite constellation. The star Betelgeuse is set to explode any day within the next thousand years.
My hometown’s not all that. Ottawa, a city that’s already barely a city. To add on, I don’t live In Ottawa, I’m on the outskirts of suburbia, the outskirts of the outskirts of the town. Living with my parents in my mid twenties, eviction woes. It’s all so pathetic. She was the only thing about me that wasn’t pathetic. That brings me to why I’m out here. I just keep asking myself, why did I do it? Why did I leave? She was the only thing in my life that was stable, she was so much better than me. What am I doing in these woods?
The trees thicken, then clear. I’m at the bottom of a hill and I’m looking out at some typical copy-paste residences. Two floors and a basement, ugly green and yellow paint job. Half the square footage taken up by the house, half for a beautiful backyard with a fence around it, where the dogs play and hump and kill small animals. I’m sick to my stomach. Nobody wants to live like that, it’s a common sentiment these days. I don’t want that, right? Right? Angel would’ve never let us live in suburbia. But people always say that, then they grow together, they have kids and get real jobs, and life comes at them fast. Then they settle down, they give up their passions and they are HAPPY! I do want that, that’s all I’ve ever wanted. I do this art shit, and it makes me puke. I hate artists, I’ve always hated them. I just fell into this stuff. I preferred math class. Sit down and listen to these equations and maybe learn a thing or two. I don’t give a rat’s ass about expression. It makes you a bad person, I mean that. You must be absurdly self absorbed; how could you possibly think that anything you make is worth hearing unless you are a flagrant narcissist. People talk about the things they create like they’re fucking Moses writing the word of God. I’ve never enjoyed anything I’ve ever made. I put it out despite myself, as some form of self harm. I think it all sucks. Angel made stuff that didn’t suck. She could bring beauty out of oil and a canvas. Watching her work was my favourite pastime. Pull up a book and watch her layer and layer until shadows and light form into a recognizable shape. Watching the canvas, it was like slowly turning down the brightness on a photo from maximum until the picture was clear. Blank paper transforms into a divine woman, all the more powerful from the effort she put in it. She never thought she could make anything worthwhile without a prompt, without someone to feed her ideas. She was wrong.
There I go again, thinking about her. She’s all I ever think about these days. I can’t even drink without becoming depressive, do you know how that feels!? It’s my new favourite pastime. I went out with my friends last weekend. At a bar, they invited a pair of beautiful young ladies to sit with us. There were four of us and two of them, but only two of us were… disposed. Single. It meant that the onus for entertaining at least one of them was on me. She was the bitchy-hot type. You meet those sometimes, women who, despite happily accepting your invitation to congregate out of sheer boredom, still act as if you are imposing your presence on them against their will. As a man with a more than slight masochistic streak, I usually adore this dynamic. However, the light in my eyes had faded and the love in my heart had been drained, so I could no longer muster the energy to give this girl the fight she needed. The poor thing had to sit there and listen to me mope. She had to endure my heartbroken stare and wounded puppy eyes when all she wanted was a free drink. I bought her one and excused myself, abandoning my friends to the succubi.
Uphill, away from suburbia. The trees are so close together the stars aren’t visible anymore. I’m leaving the only set of footprints for kilometers. The snow makes the steep climb manageable, providing me with footholds in the ice. NO TRESPASSING on a rusted metal sign with a pile of powder as its cap. Up ahead there’s some strange fenced in compound. It’s all brutalist cement buildings and electric towers bent at weird angles. The place has always made my hair stand on end. I’m sure there’s some reason for it being there, some rational explanation. It’s an energy facility or something, a governmentally regulated electromagnetic storage system. That’s what I tell myself, but it doesn’t help. The air always feels surreal as I approach. No matter, the path continues around the fence for a while before looping back down the hill again. I never showed Angel anything I wrote. I knew she wouldn’t get it, but the real problem was I knew she wouldn’t try to. She stopped caring about understanding me a long time ago, I think she figured she already had me pinned down. She knew me better than anyone else, it’s true, but a man still wants to inspire interest in his lover. I don’t ever want to be a boor, even if that’s what I am at my core. I had to beg her to listen to my music, and even then, she wouldn’t listen. Everything I’ve ever made is about her, about how she made me feel. I can’t help but feel like if she had taken the time to comprehend the words I was singing, she’d have understood what the problems in our relationship were. My whole life became about her. My goals and aspirations were first and foremost to find a job that could support us both, support her as she really did the work
for us in her painting. I just know she can do something incredible, and certainly she doesn’t need me for it. It wasn’t her fault I ended up this way. I found out I wasn’t anything special in my field of choice, so once I finished my degree it was like, now what? As a result, I put all the pressure of my life’s direction on her. That wasn’t fair, and it’s left me completely stranded without her.
I loop back around to the top of the hill once more, but something stops me in my tracks by the NO TRESPASSING sign. I lick the salt from my cheeks. I come out here to cry most days. There’s something about me that hates crying anywhere near other people. Maybe it’s because I never saw my father cry, even when I knew he wanted to. When his mother died, he went quiet for weeks. I do that too. Angel hated that, especially when she knew she had done something wrong. She used to snap at me in public, almost daily. She had self-diagnosed autism and would cite overstimulation
as the reason she would yell at me in front of total strangers. I knew she couldn’t help it, but I also knew that I couldn’t live with that forever. It was so dehumanizing, just sitting there and taking it. But we had talked about it before, she had promised to try and stop. She didn’t. I knew I was going to leave her the last time she tried it with me. It took me a total of five hours of transit time to get to her location from my parents’ house. An hour and a half downtown, two hours and fifty minutes to Montreal, usually about forty minutes from Laval station to wherever she was. Imagine, you don’t get to see your lover for weeks, you miss her dearly. She’s the only focal point in your entire pathetic life, and all you ever think about is finally getting to hold her in your arms again. You travel for five hours and finally make it to the café where your sweet girl is waiting. You’re overcome with emotion, and, within ten minutes of arriving, she snaps at you, because she has to take a piss, and someone is already in the bathroom. We’re leaving NOW. Hurry up! You’re too slow. Ugh.
People around you turn to look. It was that exact moment I knew what we had had died. She apologized for it immediately upon relieving herself, poor girl. Am I a bitch? Do you hate me?
I knew she couldn’t help it. To add insult to injury, not only was I mistreated, but I also had to put in effort to cheer her up! To assure her she had done nothing wrong, so as to save the night, so as to maybe extract some modicum of love from our short time together. It was too little, too late.
I knew what I was getting into when we started dating. I knew she was a storm cloud with a bed of flowers in its eye. She was so beautiful, a woman like that doesn’t date a loser without a catch. Is it fair for me to get mad at her about her nature? She was breathtaking when she cried. It was a major part of what attracted me to her. I used to lick the tears off her face, they tasted sweeter than you would expect. I’ve never loved before, I don’t know if girls are just like this. I’m scared and alone and completely lost. Not literally, though, I’m still standing beside the rusted metal sign. I know where that is, at least.
When I think back on our relationship, one scene comes to mind. She is standing upright, completely nude. I am kneeling on the ground at her feet, my arms are wrapped around her ample thighs, and my face is pressed into her full bush. She has the most magnificent bush, perfectly triangular without having to shave it. It smells of her, so strongly of her that we will freeze like this for ten, fifteen minutes at a time, as long as it takes for me to consume every last scent particle with my hungry nostrils until there’s no longer an odour. It’s an act of worship, all the more cemented by the fact that she won’t touch me as I do it. She stays still, unmoved, unaffected in both body and soul by my actions. She merely tolerates my adoration.
I still have a pair of her panties. I think they might have gotten washed accidentally. I sniff them sometimes, breathe in deep and long, desperate for any hint of sourness, something to remind me of her. A futile effort, they haven't been worn in ages. I never felt like I was enough for her. I never felt like she wanted me. Our copulation, for me, was transcendent. I had fucked before Angel, but I had never made love. The passion we had washed over all my previous partners a hundred-fold. I don’t think she felt the same. I had to beg her just to kiss me. We wouldn’t make love for weeks at a time, until I was left an insecure bumbling mess. Is there anything I can do to make you want me?
. But she wouldn’t listen, she had me all figured out. Oh, so I’m not fucking you enough?
. The rate at which we had sex could’ve lasted me a lifetime, I would never want her to put out more than she desired. It was the desire that was the root of the problem. It felt to me that our love making was a chore, one she did for my sake, to keep me around. The only reaction she had to my touch was that of repulsion. She would stop me in a bout of passion, to make sure I didn’t get my hopes up
. I don’t give a FUCK about getting tail right now. How could you be thinking of anything other than me at that moment? How are you not overcome with shivers in your brainstem, with heat in your skull rising up from your loins? Why can’t you feel what I am feeling? What is wrong with me that I cannot light your fire? It made me impotent, and I remain impotent to this day. I no longer feel that I can please a woman. At the time, I would cope by saying to myself that Angel was a work of art brought to life. A painting on display in a gallery, look but don’t touch. I thought that’s where her limitless talent came from. But it’s clear to me now that that isn’t true. From what I’ve gleamed from her social media, she appears to have fucked half of Montreal since we ended. She didn’t even wait a month. I know because of the pattern of movies she’s been watching. All her old favourites, she’s clearly been putting the new guys on. Now you might be saying to yourself, isn’t it normal to watch your comfort films after a breakup?
Shut up, I’m not crazy. I just know, alright? Call it our soul bond. She’s a newly single smoking hot girl in her early twenties, who’s going to art school and has only ever slept with her ex, in the sluttiest city in North America. Doesn’t exactly take a detective to figure that one out. I would do the same, in her position.
Suddenly, the hair on my neck stands on end. I swing my head 180 degrees and look behind me. Standing there, illuminated by what little moonlight has managed to slip its way through the trees, is a wolf. It stands not three meters away from me. The creature is huge, covered in a thick coat of grey fur. It is frozen as we lock eyes. The animal noticed me at precisely the same moment that I noticed it. I find it hard to believe what I’m seeing, wolves aren’t known to travel this far south. For a couple seconds, we are suspended in place. I don’t even take a breath. The majestic beast’s snout curls up into a snarl, but to me it appears to be laughing. The lone wolf’s eyes are full of understanding, and it almost seems to speak to me. It seems to be saying:
All springs from your own insecurity. That woman loved you, and you her. You fell into a routine when it came to your sexuality? So what? You and every other couple on this earth. What does it matter that she would boil over in public, like an active volcano? You are the one who wouldn’t meet her with passion. What she sought was a reaction from you, a reprimanding. She wanted a man who would stand up for himself, who would join her in anger and tell her not to speak to him that way. You treated her like a child, under the guise of processing your emotions, whatever that means. You have never processed anything, just internalised more and more suffering until it became too much to bear. Perhaps, if you had looked her in the eyes and told her not to talk to you like you were lesser, firmly held your ground against the Goddess you so worship, she could have respected you as an equal. Only then could you have reignited some flame of desire in her soul. What were you so afraid of? Making her cry? You’ve seen her cry from knocking a hairbrush off her desk in the morning. As it stands, YOU chose the mortal-immortal dynamic that she was forced into. You have stolen her innocence, tortured her kind soul with your inadequacy, and abandoned her to fend for herself, wholly unprepared for the evil in men’s hearts. You think those francophone sharks won’t smell blood in the water? You think they won’t take advantage of her vulnerability, snatch a quick fuck and leave her alone, used and unloved? That is but the way of the wilderness. None of this is of any consequence, however. What’s done is done. She is strong, she will be fine without you. The reality is none of these worries have anything to do with why you left her. There was no reason for it, no logical explanation. There is no emotional calculation you can complete which will reveal some flaw in her, or in yourself, which ruined what you two had built. You simply sensed something within her soul, some hardened kernel of her being which was deeply unhappy when near you. Your gut told you that there was no way for you to both stay by her side and for her to be satisfied in life. In the end, it was all animal instinct. In the end, we are the same. We both-
My imagination stops short as the grey beast actually begins speaking. Well, as much as a canine can speak. It lets out a piercing howl, snout pointing towards the moon, and a shiver runs down my spine. Moments later, a howl is heard in answer, then another, followed by many more. All directions seem to point to another wolf in the pack. My first thought isn’t that of fear. As it stalks closer, I can only think that even this lone animal has a place where it belongs, has connections with those of its kind. Am I truly the only solitary soul on this God forsaken planet? Am I doomed to die alone, cursed to be full of a love which has nowhere it belongs?
A flash of fur and teeth and claws, followed by a sharp burning where my neck meets my collarbone. Fuck. FUCK. This was no spirit animal, no metaphor for the beastly nature in my broken heart. This is a real-life wild animal, and it is trying to fucking kill and eat me. Oh my God, how could I be so self absorbed that I would sit here and lower myself on the food chain. I rip the wolf off my throat, and some of my flesh is torn off with it. Through pure reflex, I deliver a swift kick to the canine’s snout. I hear a whimper, and it scampers off into the bushes. Still, howling can be heard from every direction. Pressing my hands against my new wound, I begin to run as fast as my adrenaline will take me. It’s tough, moving down through the snowy path I came from. There’s a layer of ice resting on top of the white powder, such that my boots are stuck in place with every step, hindering my momentum. I am bleeding profusely from the neck, and my hands cannot contain it. A trail of crimson follows my southbound sprint.
I am breathing heavy and uneven as I near the suburban houses I spotted earlier. I must have been pursued relentlessly for some 20 minutes now. Suddenly a thought crosses my mind. My face doesn’t feel quite right, like it’s frozen in place, in an expression I don’t immediately register. You’d think that I would be grimacing in pain, thanks to the gaping hole in my throat, but that isn’t true. Up ahead, blocking my path, is another huge wolf. It’s brighter, now that the trees have mostly subsided, and I can make out that this one has a deep brown pelt. I could duck into the bushes, try to outmaneuver this animal and get around him, to safety. No, that won’t work, he is much more agile than I and I would lose all visibility by leaving the path. Who knows how many beasts are lying in wait under the cover of shrubbery. As I am considering my options, I take a step forward and almost trip over a large rock buried in the snow. Removing my right hand from my gushing injury, I grab the boulder and cock my arm back, ready to strike. The only way forward is through. I approach the canine with my left arm extended straight out, as bait.
He lunges and falls for my trap. My arm is between him and my body, so the wolf is forced to bite down on my forearm. His fangs pass through my jacket sleeve like a hot knife through butter, and he sinks his teeth into my flesh. Just when I think the pain is unbearable, it gets worse. A smaller member of the pack has snuck up behind me and has closed her jaws around my right calf. They’re trying to get me off my feet, attacking as one unit. Searing pain fills my head, but I remain steadfast and standing. I know if I fall, it’s all over. I’m dinner.
Well don’t you two make quite the perfect couple.
I swing my cocked right arm, along with the heavy stone, into the brown beast’s skull. CRACK. I can almost hear his brain rattling around in there. The big wolf falls limp at my feet. The smaller creature releases my calf and darts off into the wilderness, presumably to look for some other mate, before her last one’s body has even gone cold. Typical.
I limp past the houses and emerge onto the street. It seems to me to be another world, far removed from the wilderness I’ve just fought for my life in. The road is all ploughed and illuminated by spherical streetlamps, one for every property. I know my hunters wouldn’t dare follow me out into civilization. I feel lightheaded, and my vision is blurry. I must have lost too much blood. I lift my hands, meaning to plug the neck wound once more, but instead I trace my visage with my fingers, smearing crimson over my cheeks. I finally understand the expression I’m wearing. I realise that, in the entire time I’ve been struggling for survival, I haven’t thought about Angel once. It’s the first time in years that I’ve had thirty minutes of peace, free from her image. My face is frozen in a wide grin.