Meeting Fate in the Forest

The crack of the branch was just loud enough to alert me that something was there. It's a peculiarity of his; he likes to let you know he's around, but doesn't want to announce his presence. In our previous encounters it's been a creaking floorboard, or an open door, or a window left ajar. Maybe it's just his British understatement--despite his being incontrovertibly not British--at work, or maybe he just wants to imbue these deeply weird visits with some sense of normalcy. Whatever the reason, he always pops up in the most mundane ways.

I had decided to go for a walk because of the unseasonably warm weather--highs nearing 20 degrees had turned the clouds soft and prodded them to release flurries of pillowy white snow--through a favored path near my house, and I spun quickly at the sound of snapping wood, fearing I'd encountered the wolf rumored to be prowling outside the village. My long hair in the falling snow made for a shimmer of gold and white as I turned about--and there he was. The same as he'd ever been.

"Hello, BB," he smiled, his ample stomach covered in a blue cashmere sweater and his grey curls peeking out from beneath a pageboy cap.

I suppressed a gasp as he came into view.

"Fate."

His grin faded but his eyes still twinkled. "It's good to see you."

In all the years we'd known each other, and through meetings at turns teasing, adversarial, even, once, outright violent, he'd never looked at me the way he was looking at me now. Like he was seeing something he hadn't noticed before.

"Fate," I said. "Last time..."

I let the apology hang in the air and he waved it away.

"You were young last time," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. "And in a great deal of pain, most of which was not your doing."

I laughed against the shame that burned beneath my cheeks.

"I think I'll always be young to you," I said.

The smile returned to his face.

"Even so."

"Thank you," I responded, deciding for once to accept compassion when it was offered to me. I resolved to do that more often. And what could I say, anyway?

I'm sorry I fell so far. 

I'm sorry I lost my hope. 

I'm sorry I became someone else for a while. 

I'm sorry I hurt you. 

I'm sorry I hurt myself.

The last time we'd seen each other was five years earlier, in the context of a life-consuming crisis that ended with my attempted suicide in October 2013. Childhood demons had risen to devour me, and in the spiral of despair and rage that followed my fate felt like a black hole of anguish--and he, Fate, the master of that anguish. When he'd appeared in my parents' kitchen in Mountain Town I was drunk and wounded. I spoke in a way that made me recoil to remember. I hit him.

His dark eyes in my present offered understanding, forgiveness, some measure of respect.

"Do you know why I'm here?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, then cocked my head in genuine surprise at my own answer. For once he didn't have a leg up on me. I started laughing. "There's something I never thought I'd say."

He loosed a full-throated guffaw and kept taking me in with those impenetrable eyes. "So you've figured it out."

I nodded. "I'm leaving, aren't I?"

"In time," he responded. "Along a path unique to you. But yes."

He clapped me on the back. "You're not meant to linger, my boy. Not here. Not yet. Too many strands for you. Lives to be lived. In some ways you see and some you don't."

I considered that.

"I think I've always known," I said after a long pause. "That it wasn't going to be the white-picket thing for me. I've been chasing that because I never got to have it as a kid. But I can't ever replace my own childhood. All I can do is build my adult life. And maybe I will have the white-picket thing. Maybe it just looks different for me."

"It looks different for everyone," he offered. "Happiness wears many colors. Sings many songs. Each tune lovely to the ear for which it was made. It's something that gives me comfort in difficult moments."

I gazed at him a while, tried to imagine myself through his eyes.

"I know now why you come," I said. "Well, not why you come. But why you come when you do."

"And why is that?"

Memories, memories. Years floating by.

"When I was getting ready to graduate college," I said. "You came then. When I started working in publishing, with all that opened up. All that taught me. You've visited at touchstones. Moments of realization. Or reckoning." My eyes went hard, and his went cloudy. "Last time..."

"A touchstone," he pronounced, his smile sad. "When you teetered between death and life. Between a closing of all your fates, and the opening of many possible ones." 

Truth hit me like a gust of subzero wind.

"You didn't know," I gasped. "You didn't know what would happen."

"I knew what could happen," he answered, his mouth a thin line. "Not what would. In so many ways I am only a steward. It is easier stewarding for some than for others. Your openness has always made you..." He waved his hand in a circle. "Confounding. All these potentialities spiraling off. And one or two so very black. As I said, it's good to see you."

I pondered the drifting snowflakes, each frozen sparkle unique. Each a possibility, never replicated. Falling all over and dancing on my fair face.

"It's good to see you, too," I said, and realized, again to moderate shock, that I meant it. His past visits had so often portended another milestone on the black road to death along which I raced for the first half of my twenties. Today his presence just confirmed I'd figured out something that needed figuring-out.

"You threw off a measure of fear when you came here," he said. "Continue throwing it off. Follow the voice that calls, even when it doesn't tell you what you think you ought to hear. Your road can encompass so much if only you will embrace it."

I thought back on decisions made, plans laid, e-mails sent, phone calls placed. A friend mourned. All within the space of about a week, last week, when I'd taken stock of things and chosen to pursue an ambition I'd laid aside for timeliness' sake.

"So you do know some things," I said.

"What can be," he answered. "What might be. The balance in many particulars is up to you."

"That's what Good said," I noted. "She appeared in the airport when I first came here. She said I was more tightly bound to you than some, less tightly bound than others."

"She's wise," he mused. "And she likes you."

I snorted. "She should come around more often. Maybe send a few winning lotto tickets my way."

"I'll have to mention it to her," he said dryly. The winter sunset had colored the sky in rapidly fading hues of subdued copper and scarlet. He appraised them like they were an approaching bus. "That'll be me, then. It's been good to chat."

He lifted his hand to wave, but before I could stop myself I'd stepped forward and wrapped him in a hug.

"Thank you for my possibilities."

He surveyed me with genuine surprise. Again, not something I ever thought I'd see.

"You know, given how our other discussions have gone, I expected a somewhat different reception," he pronounced. "I seem to recall your pushing me out a window twice--no, three times. Two of them at a considerable height. In light of all that I'd been keeping my eye out for a wood-chipper or a renegade snow machine. Perhaps a rabid moose."

I laughed. "Two of those times you jumped--" He glared. "--Under duress, fine. Point conceded. And I looked into it, but you need a permit for a wood-chipper, so..."

He stepped back with crinkling eyes.

"Eyes and heart open, my young friend. And mind disciplined."

The last blades of sunlight folded behind the evergreen horizon, and Fate vanished into the twilight.