Dr Pepper Zero and Wet Grass

I stepped from the cold comfort of our home, as the central heating had been switched off; the bite of autumn soon to be winter could be felt in the air. Even seconds before when I stood on the inside of the door, bracing myself, I gasped and saw my breath drift from my mouth towards the mosaic windows. Now, settling out from the natural darkness of a home when everything is powered down, I entered the embrace of a more intense drop in temperature and luminance. My fingers ached as the atmosphere feasted on the bare skin, as the light, fine rain coated the shiny surface of my bald head. I could unlock the door, of course, and retrace my steps to the bedroom and pick up my padded waterproof gloves. But, a very deep fear gripped me, held me tight, and I knew in this state of flux I found myself in, there was no going back or I would simply never leave. So I lifted the handle and double locked, listening to the metallic mechanisms and springs clunk.

Then carefully alighted the three stairs from my front door to the pathway that took me to the street I had called home for just short of three years. As my feet pressed into the brown and red scattering of dead leaves I reminisced about decisions, turning points and the agency behind them.

As I reached a very literal fork in the road, nothing sinister or mystical from Middle Earth or the like, just two paths to approach the woodland pass I wanted to take before reaching my destination, I thought about how often forks in the road are not always so obvious in real life. Stepping along the narrow and winding path that descended slightly deeper into the woods, I remember not appreciating the two paths that laid before me when I made one of those most devastating decisions of my life.

Now don't get me wrong, I have made many and will make many bad decisions. I don't want to come off sounding melodramatic. This is not suddenly going to become a Hallmark movie or soap opera.

As the dull and joyless sky was blocked by the evergreen canopy of the trees bearing down on me slightly as I walked along the path, I thought about a much brighter day. A much brighter and happier day... when even stoic sentinels like these fir trees could not block out the sunshine.

But the sunshine doesn't last forever, and no cliché exists without being grounded in some truth.

We had been happy. Not ecstatically so, but we had a greater accumulation of better days than worse ones.

My ears gently pricked at the quiet but unashamed ebb and flow, the lull of the stream that ran alongside the path I had chosen. For as much as it delighted my aural senses, it gave me pause to recall one specific reason I preferred the ocean to inland freshwater streams. The scent floating into my nostrils lacked that saltiness, that oceanic seasoning you only got with seawater. The scent of evergreens and the occasional whiff of manure were all my olfactory senses could claim.

Which brought me back to the many times I had stood on the promenade looking to the beach, stepping onto the sand and immersing myself in the sensorial feast. Reaching down to lift sand into my palm and feel it fall between my fingers. Sifting through the wreckage of what was dragged back to land with the tide.

Razor clams and shells, crab claws and other pieces that remain after the gulls had fed until bursting, no doubt.

The sound of a sparrow or a little fly brings me back to the tiny man-made stream and the woods.

Joining the chorus of sparrow and fly is a woman with her dog.

My feet step back onto the path and follow it through the wooded detour away from the main road and the deafening barrage of traffic. Her red raincoat is the first thing I see. Then her black lab. She has a ball-throwing toy and the dog is loving it, lapping around her as she readies to throw it after he's dropped it in her hand.

My thoughts suddenly shift, as we pass more closely and offer small pleasantries.

"Bit blustery today," I say.

"Baba loves it though," she points to the dog as he runs around me, sniffing at my ankles.

I just smile and move on, but I'm not really thinking of the blonde with the red raincoat anymore or her black lab, evidently called Baba. I'm thinking of her.

Fading in and out, slow motion bleeds into rewind as I remember the distancing and my own questions of agency and search for beauty. Not physically per se, but for life.

Dreams of closeness and freshness that grow gradually and work their way into the corners of your mind, heart and body.

I thought we had become detritus, crumpled leaves that the tree had shed. We had shed each other, in my mind. We were on converging but separate paths.

Wiping some drizzle and the saltwater tears from my eyes, I recalled the search for something different. Something I thought I needed beyond the prisonic safety of home. While I led myself blindly searching for beauty, I told myself I had agency after we fell in with one another all those years ago. How my hazy eyes and desperate, treacherous heart wrongly reanalysed our coupling as something passive, that just happened.

I was taking life in my hands, without consideration for her and her own thoughts, feelings and agency. Covert selfishness personified itself as a steely determination to live the life I wanted to.

Blindly.

Excuses can feel like kindnesses. When you're looking for a reason to change. Like I was. So I searched and sought out something different. It might never have been, and probably wouldn't have been, the ultimate switching point; but it poisoned my reasoning and conscience.

And as I stepped further into the wide open space of possibility and potential and progress—and other p-words that seep and leak positivity, even a tainted, deluded positivity—I saw the dullness of the overcast light saturated through the leaves still grasping to the limbs of the trees at the end of the path.

This wide open space felt claustrophobic in its limitless landscape of blankness. And it reminded me of the rain that followed the sunshine of my so rightly and justly determined path to freedom; it hurt, it cut, and it bled out over me. It brought me back to earth—a deeper layer of earth, among the detritus and worm food I thought my world had become.

Here I was lying there, as her tears burned through holes in my conscience, and reason returned as the sun returns at the start of the day after hiding in the shadows of the night.

I felt my legs give way and my knees pressed, squished down into the wet grass as the memories flooded my mind. I let my hood fall so the rain could saturate my neck and down into the shadowed places that lay between the fabric offering heat retention and my flesh, as goosebumps formed.

Fuck. I have become the ruiner and cause of my own suffering.

I had dismissed the beauty—both the physical, those lines and curves, scents and sounds that took form as Her—but more than just the physical, beauty was there to be found as experience. A life we had built, a life that was bursting with regrets, sure, but also those delightful wins and successes.

I let the damp permeate and become part of me. At that point I realised all I had cost, but also all that remained. For nothing is ever so tidy in life. Our end was a beginning, but not a bright new beginning for us; it only felt like that for me because I did it at another time when things got tough. The sum of all this was that we were still us.

Beauty had been there from the first time I typed to her, the first time I heard her speak and laugh across the telephone line that connected us over miles—or kilometres, depending on how you measured the distance.

I pursued dishonesty based on my own lack of agency in being honest with her about us. No matter how I fell into this life, I took the first steps towards her, as she was the beauty I needed in my life. In retrospect, can we always know what we truly need?

All this pondering, these recollections of a past assessed in error. I realised the time, pushed my palms against the squelching soil, and took to my feet. I stepped forward out of the trees toward the local garage—a British idiom for a gas station. I bought myself a white Monster, a Dr Pepper Zero, and some important toilet paper, finishing the transaction with a quiet, grounding sense of clarity.

*

Thanks for reading

This is my fiction entry for Sasha's awesome, A Very Vocal Beauty Pageant — Unofficial Challenge (Non-V+ Welcome!).

Author's notes - this is a fictionalised take on some real life stuff.