Telemachus Rising (12 page)

My thoughts drifted.  First it was the woods, then the moon.  I don't know how or when it started, but she crept into my thoughts.  Over the monotony of the snow and trees, I could see her like she was right in front of me.  There she was, inches away.  Sideways.  Long dark hair spilling down over her cheek, spread between us on my ridiculous couch bed.  Soft pink lips and eyes that never seemed to blink.  She looked so delicate laying there.  Breakable.  She had bony elbows and hips that flared out from a narrow waist.  I can remember my arm draped gently around her, how hot her body felt when I pulled her toward me.  I kissed her like I was hungry, and god did she kiss me back.  I'd never wanted anything so badly in my life.

I didn't even see the trees, the trail, not that there was much to see.  The woods around me were dark, and the winding path was...less dark.  I was on auto pilot, hypnotized by the repetition of my surroundings, operating somewhere between fully awake and dozing on the run.  I was on the very edge of awareness, with something warm and inviting just out of reach.  Out of reach like the smell of her perfume.  I could almost bring it back if I tried hard enough.  

I dissolved into that moment.  That moment where she's kissing me back and I touch her cheek.  Her breath comes hot, and I can feel it on my face.  My fingers trail down her throat and the edge of my thumb traces her collar bone.  I kiss down along her jaw and the curve of her neck.  She tilts her head away and there's a quick catch in her breath.  I take her bicep in my hand and push her shoulder down to the bed.  Her hair spreads out like silk, and I can't stop myself from lacing my fingers through it.  Her chest is heaving when our lips meet again, and I have to touch that, too.  The layers of fabric are frustratingly thick, but I can't get enough of her.  She wraps a leg around me, trapping one of mine.  My hand goes to her hip as she starts to grind them against me.  I never want to stop kissing this girl.  There's a strip of exposed skin where her shirt has started to ride up, and I can't let it go to waste.  She's so soft, so impossibly soft.

I turn my attention back to her neck so I can shift my weight off her.  My hand drifts from the curve above her hip to the inside of her thigh.  Her legs part and my fingers touch the burning hot denim between them.  She has trouble working the buckle of my belt without looking.  We both laugh a little when I have to help her get it undone, but we never stop kissing.  Even now, all this time later, I can still hear what she said next like the words just left her lips.  But the scent of her perfume, the familiar, warm, intoxicating smell she left on my pillows and in my bed is gone forever.  Lost.

A sound on the trail ahead caught my full attention.  Sometimes when I was running, I'd get tunnel vision.  I wouldn't see or hear anything but whatever I was focusing on.  I'd run right by old friends without evening noticing them on the sidewalk.  It could be embarrassing.  Once, a few weeks earlier, I'd almost run right into a couple of deer in those woods.  I noticed them at the last second and skidded to a stop on the ice.  They froze for a instant and then took off through the trees.  It would've been funny if the whole thing hadn't caught me so completely off guard.  Then again, it wouldn't have happened at all if I had seen them sooner.  After that surprise encounter, I took noises on the trail late at night pretty seriously.

I kept my eyes peeled and aimed toward the sound without slowing down.  There was a straightaway about a hundred meters down.  If there was something ahead of me on the trail, I'd be able to see it.  I'd forgotten that the straight section of the path began with a set of rolling hills.  They weren't easy to manage with the snow we'd gotten.  The trail didn't look like it had seen much use lately, and there were snow drifts in some places.

I was looking up from one of those drifts when I caught my first glimpse of him.  I knew it was a runner right away, even though I only saw the back of a neck and a hat way off in the distance.  By the time I crested the next little hill, he was out of sight.  That was not going to stop me.  I didn't know what he was doing on my turf, but I was going to find out.  I accelerated instictively and my form smoothed out as I followed the path deeper into the woods after him.  Who was this tourist?  I had been out there every single night and I'd never so much as caught wind of anyone else.  Now here was this guy taking off ahead of me.  What the hell was that about?  No way was he holding that pace.

It was a good quarter mile before I started to catch up with him, and by then the trail was weaving in and out of the trees so much I was only barely making contact.  Whoever this asshole was, he was sure moving.  I was starting to reel him in, though.  I'd make contact for a good couple of seconds before he could make it to the next bend.  Maybe I was just better with tangents.  The back of this guy's neck was the only thing in the world that mattered.  Without even realizing it, I'd gone into race mode.  By Ricky Rack, I love to run...I was moving.  My nice easy thirteen mile pace snuck up to a solid 5:30 mile – nothing impressive for a 5k, but respectable for a marathon, which is what this was turning into.

He must've heard me closing in, because out of no where, he took off like it was the gun lap.  I couldn't believe it.  I'd lost him again.  That was too much.  I was not going down that easily.  I threw myself down the trail like it really was a race.  It was time to end it once and for all.  There was no way – CRACK!  FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.

It didn't happen in slow motion.  I didn't see it coming.  It came out of fucking nowhere.  While I was busy chasing some figment of my imagination, which is what that son of a bitch had to be, I'd completely overshot my turn around point.  I had been hauling ass along some piece of trail I might have never even walked before, let alone run.  At night.  In the snow.  The fact that I had just gone over a bridge didn't register.  More importantly, I had failed to notice the sharp left hand turn on the other end.  So there I was, flying down the far side of this bridge when I plowed headlong off the edge of the trail.  Instead of landing on the solid foundation of the path, my heel cut through several extra inches of drifted snow until my leg locked.  When my foot hit the ground at that speed with a locked knee?  It turns my stomach thinking about what the hyper extension must've looked like.  I don't know how far my knee folded in the wrong direction, but it would've made one hell of a video for the internet.

As soon as I heard that pop echo through my body, as soon as I hit the ground, before I finished tumbling and slid to a stop at the bottom of the hill that supported the trail, I knew I had torn my ACL.  I was fucked.  Proper fucked.  My knee throbbed.  As a bonus, I'd bitten my tongue while going ass over teakettle down the hill.  I just laid there in the snow.  I didn't even move.  I felt sick.  Angry.  Pissed off at my shitty luck and my bad judgment and the unfuckingfair series of events that landed me, crippled, in a snow drift in the woods in the middle of the goddamn night.  I let out one long, pitiful sob.  I felt so fucking sorry for myself.  But that's where it ended.  In ten seconds, my sweat felt like ice water.  That was when I realized I was about to have bigger problems than a torn ligament.

I had set out to run a familiar route, so I hadn't worn my watch.  I couldn't estimate time for the life of me, but I could identify pace per mile within a couple seconds.  However far I had actually traveled, I knew I was more than six and a half miles from home.  It may have only taken about forty five minutes to get there at a run, but it would be at least a two hour walk, even if I hadn't wrecked my knee.  My layers of clothing were enough to keep me warm while I was moving, but I wasn't cranking out all that body heat just laying there.  My clothes were starting to feel wet and sticky.  And cold.  The tumble down the hill let snow in everywhere.  Up my sleeves, into my shoes.  My hat had come off altogether.

I took a deep breath and gathered my nerves.  What fucking luck.  I began to stand up, and pain shot through my bad knee when I tried to bend it.  This was going to take some work.  I got into push up position and bent my good leg up toward my chest.  With all my weight on it, I struggled to bring myself upright.  I was gasping from the effort, the pain, and the sprint that led to the fall in the first place.  I straightened my bad knee as much as I could and eased that foot a few inches forward.  It hurt, but it held my weight.  I hopped forward onto my good leg again to repeat the process.  It was tougher going, now that I'd reached the incline.  I hopped forward again, but the sole of my running shoe slipped in the snow, shock loading and hyper extending my bad knee for the second time.

I hit the ground with a yell, but the new wave of pain was just a modest encore of the initial injury.  God I was fucked.  When I got my breath back, I started to claw my way up the hill.  Progress was grinding.  I could only push with one leg, and I seemed to slip back six inches for every foot I gained.  I had to dig into the snow and buried brush with my fingers every time I repositioned my good leg.  It was exhausting and agonizing on my knee.  I found my hat about halfway up the slope.  It was full of snow and made my ears feel colder when I put it on.

It must've taken me a full ten minutes to claw my way back up that hill.  At least that's what it seemed like.  I know I was shivering when I collapsed at the top.  I couldn't help it.  I looked down the trail to see if anyone was in sight, if anyone could have heard me yell.  Nobody.  There was a walkway cut through the snow, but no way to know if anyone had used it in the past fifteen minutes or the past twenty four hours.  I was alone, completely alone, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night.  I felt so defeated.  I was broken.  This wasn't some little muscle strain that would get better on its own.  No, my knee was never going to be the same after this.  An injury like this was going to require surgery and months of rehabilitation.  I wouldn't be able to walk for a while.  I might never run again, at least not like I had.  That's when the second wave of misery hit.  All those months and years of cumulative training.  Literally thousands of miles of blood and sweat.  Down the drain.  Completely wasted.  Stronger, faster than I'd ever been in my entire life, and I wouldn't even get to run a race.  I might never get to run a race again.  Not seriously.  Where did that leave me?  I raged inside.  Fit as I'd ever been, and I would have to spend the next year, helpless, watching myself decay.  The pain of the injury was nothing compared to the pain of that realization.  Maybe freezing to death would be the better option.

But it wasn't an option.  Not really.  People seem to believe that life is full of choice, but there's a certain degree of bullshit to that.  Most choices are hypothetical, not real.  For example, right now you could strip naked, walk into your local fast food joint, and order a combo meal.  Hypothetically, you could totally do that.  You might even get away with it!  If you got caught, what would they nail you with, indecent exposure?  Public indecency?  If you were a man and there were children in the area, they might charge you with some kind of sexual misconduct.  Point being, they probably wouldn't throw you in prison just for ordering chicken nuggets with a breeze around your bits.  But is doing that a “real” option for a normal person?  No.  Of course it isn't.  Neither are the millions of other choices that go against your nature.  So lying down to die in a snow bank was not something I could do, no matter how miserable I felt.

Instead of lying beside the trail any longer, I tried to stand up.  The effort was wasted.  I was spent, completely exhausted from my reckless race through the woods, the excruciating climb, and the slipping falls I'd taken on the way up.  I kept trying anyway.  I got to my hands and knees and planted my good foot.  I put one hand on the ground and one on my thigh.  I gathered all the strength I could find and pushed.  My arms and legs trembled with the effort.  Nothing happened.  I didn't move an inch.  I'd never felt so neutered in my life.  I must've traveled a lot further a lot faster than I'd thought before I went off the trail, because I had nothing left in the tank.  I went down to my knees and elbows to rest for another effort, in half a sprawl because I couldn't bend my bad leg at all anymore.  The knee had swollen up.  It felt about the size of a cantaloupe.  When I tried to get up again, my “good” leg wouldn't even move under its own power.  I had to use both hands to drag it into position.  I waited that way, catching my breath.  God it was cold out there.  After another minute I got my wind back, but standing was out of the question.  I just crouched there with my stiff, swollen leg splayed out behind me, holding my other knee to my chest for warmth.  Miserable, hopeless thoughts turned into miserable, hopeless imagination, and maybe even miserable, hopeless dreams.  I might've dozed off at that point.  Maybe “passed out” would be a more accurate description.  Either way, I can't be sure of how long I sat there.    

It was still dark when I opened my eyes again.  For an instant, I had to fight to part my eyelids.  My upper and lower eyelashes had frozen together.  The sweat that had soaked through my outer layers of clothing had frozen into thin crusts of ice that covered my back and shoulders.  Some had chunks of snow frozen to them.  However long I had been out there, it had already been too long.  A wave of terror swept away my self pity and frustration.  It was time to get moving.  Immediately.  With a fight, I brought myself up into a runner's starting position.  How many times had I waited that way in blocks at the start of a race?  This time my muscles shook from too little energy instead of the nervous tremor that comes from an overflowing abundance.  As I tried to stand one last time, my leg crumpled under me.  Again.

StiIl, I knew had to move.  I had to go.  I could not stay there.  My body was useless, but my determination was single minded.  There was only one thought repeating over and over again in my head.  I needed to get home.  I needed to move.  Now.  Now.  Now.  Slowly, I began to lift off the ground.  My back began to straighten.  My head rose several feet above the trail for the first time since I had plowed down the hill.  As I continued to rise, my bad leg hung limp from its hip.  Hung there, with both of my feet a fraction of an inch above the surface of the road.