Deep in the woods, too deep to be sensible in any human perception, there lies a path, clear of foliage and patterned with fallen leaves. It begins in the midst of the brush, out of nowhere in particular, and meanders with the same lack of focus, winding over hills and around trees and through clearings for which no axe was responsible.

There is something inexpressibly sinister about this path, but no one can say for certain what makes it so. No birdsong can be heard while traversing it, nor is there the rustle of any woodland life beneath the leaves. No one has ever seen elk or deer, and while the region is known for its cougar and coyote population, travelers have seen not a sight of any dangerous predator. The only noise any ear can catch is the distant sound of wind in the limbs above.

Most who happen across this path leave its confines quickly enough. Even if they don’t notice the eerie lack of sound, the hairs on the back of their neck start to rise, cold beads of sweat trickle down their cheeks, and their stomach churns with a strange anxiety. Due to their haste to be away from this forest path, no one has kept the presence of mind to map it or name it, and so it remains a surprise to all who come across it.

The path is quiet, always. The sky above is slate-grey, thick clouds covering the face of the sun. A heavy skin of late autumn leaves carpets the available ground, a skin that never, even in the summer months, fully goes away.

There’s a loud rustle nearby, close to the start of this path. A man in a dark blue jacket nearly falls as he forces his way through the thick brush. With intense speed and muttered curses, he brushes the leaves and twigs away and begins to stride along the path.

There’s a flex in his jaw and his eyes are not on the world in front of him. He is in a state, this man. Something in the past hour has vexed him.

His name is Franklan Rommel. That’s the name on his birth certificate. He prefers to be called Cal, for somewhat complicated reasons.

He is not a hiker. This much can be gleaned easily from the state of his clothes. He wears a track jacket, but beneath it he wears a sleek cotton shirt that’s already soaked through with sweat. The jeans are made for fashion, not athletics, and they’re already soaked with mud at the bottom edges. The tennis shoes are old and worn, with several holes ripped through the leather and the sole. The sticky remnants of duct tape can be seen on the edges.

He is not an office worker, not yet at least. Neither is he an athlete, though both futures have been laid before him, opportunities with their hands held out wide. He took one of those hands, but he’s still not sure if it was the right one. He doesn’t have much time left if he wants to change his decision.

He is not a married man. His fingers are bereft of adornment, though several of them are red and swollen.

He is not typically a disorganized man. His hair is tousled, his pockets turned out, his wallet, keys, and phone absent from his person.

Neither is he, strictly speaking, a man. Not quite, or maybe not yet. He just passed his twentieth birthday. Some people are men when they are twenty years old, but this one is not. This is a reflection of both his maturity and his personal identity. These questions have been up in the air for him for all his life. But calling him a ‘boy’ or even a ‘person’ seem too wrong, too far in other directions he’s uncomfortable in. He has told others that continuing to call him a man is fine, no matter how inaccurate it is, for now.

These questions, and others, are part of the reason for the state he is in. But every strong reaction requires a catalyst to truly ignite.

He’s stomping down the path, has been for almost an hour now. The brooding in his head is holding his attention, and so he hasn’t yet noticed the stillness of the air, the silence around him, the nonsensical turns to this path. He has not noticed it, but his body has. He swipes irritably at a brow that’s grown moistened with cold sweat. He rubs the back of his neck at the hairs trembling upright.

A full hour has passed before his pace finally slows, then stops. His lungs are working heavily from the long hour of furious strides, and his ragged breath forms barely imperceptible clouds of mist before his lips. He envelops his face in his hands. He has not reached a mental impasse, has not found an inner peace from his troubles, but he has lost the energy to continue his aimless steps. His anger molds over into bitterness instead, and gnaws at his toes like hungry rats.

He wants a place to sit, a location where he can collapse down and in on himself, where he can hide from every eye, his own most of all. A rock or a crook in some tree roots would serve. He lifts his head to search for such a place, and it is only then that he realizes where he is.

He is lost.

A faint wind touches him gently on the arms and ruffles the leaves, so that for a moment, there is movement all about him. This unsettles rather than mollifies him, as it seems the bushes and the plants rouse awake to his presence as soon as he does to theirs. Cal Rommel is not an imaginative man, so his awareness of this impression touches him more deeply, more instinctively, than it would another.

He stands, transfixed, upon this moment, unable to move, incapable of thought. He has been swimming steadily on the surface of the water before realizing he’s stranded himself in a dark ocean. His breath scrapes noisily through his lungs, and his wildly pumping pulse won’t let him slow it down. He’s never been any good at treading water.

An indeterminate amount of time passes with him in this state.

A moment comes where two observations make themselves known to this frightened man. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast that morning - the day before him had filled him with nerves, and he hadn’t had any appetite, but it’s coming back in full force now that satiation is out of reach. His second observation is that the light in the clouds casting down at him has dimmed. The thick greyness of the sky makes it difficult to know for certain, but the sun must be setting.

Fear had made the time stretch into unknown reaches, but now that time snaps back to reality, and he jerks as he feels the whiplash. He has to move, and he has to move now. He can’t stay here on this path; neither his body nor the world around him will permit it. But does he turn back, or go onward?

He looks back at the distance he’s already traversed. The path winds around a rocky incline, roofed by dark trees that glower down at the decomposing leaves. The angles of the land make it look to him like a shadowy hollow, a warren to house an unseen monster. He can hardly believe he walked through it once, and can’t fathom walking through it again.

He turns back to the path before him. It climbs up a gradual hill, narrows, and turns to the right, its further direction hidden by brush. The fear of the unknown tugs at him then, argues for the path behind. He’s walked through it once, right? Nothing bad happened when he did. Therefore it’s unlikely anything bad would happen now.

His practical side puts in a quiet word. He has no idea how long he’s been walking for. Two hours, three? It would take just as long, if not longer, if he turned back, and night would have fallen by then. And that would only take him to the end of the path, the place from which he started.

How big is this forest? his practical side continues, its voice too often going unheard. A path must lead somewhere, right? This one might take a long time to navigate, but it should end eventually, hopefully, somewhere he can find help and make his way back home.

Thus says Cal Rommel’s practicality, and thus he decides to continue onward. He decides, but he makes no move forward, takes no onward step.

He is not a brave man. Not brave, not practical, not imaginative, but now all the faults of these are crashing down on him. Because he knows what this place is. He can feel the wrongness of this path, the inexplicable fear that touches him, he feels it creep up from beneath the leaves, crawl between his toes, clutch at his knees. The silence hungers for him.

He feeds it, unwillingly. He takes a step forward and a twig snaps beneath his foot.

The air snaps with it. He can take it no longer, and without any further thought at all, he runs.

Up the path, up the hill, through the bushes, around the corner, skidding on the wet leaves, the branches of the bushes grasp at him from the sides and all the while the clouds above close in on the last waning light of the sun. His wide eyes are on the ground before him, watching for roots or treacherous terrain, he nearly slips on the blanket of leaves but his momentum keeps him on. A left turn, then a right, and then the ground opens up to a ravine with the path running along its side. He splashes into watery mud and this time he really slips, his foot careening sideways and sending him into the puddle. He finds himself sliding towards the ravine and terror catapults into his throat and out in a squeaky cry as he grabs for a handhold, anything to keep him from falling down the muddy incline. There’s nothing around, nothing to grasp, but his wild lunge has regained his balance. He’s not falling. He remains in his twisted position, knowing that any wayward movement might send him down, and slowly, carefully, eases his body up the path back to the wet leaves until he can untangle himself and stand upright.

He doesn’t stand upright, not for a while. The panic has not receded, but the adrenaline has run out for now. He is afraid, but there is no face to the source of his fear. Running has not allowed him to escape. Now he tries to hide.

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It will not help him either. The instinctive, primal mind has many weaknesses. There are things that it cannot escape, no matter what it tries to do to outrun me. I cannot be outrun. I cannot be outmaneuvered. I always try to explain this, for I am very patient. But the primal mind is not good at listening.

His breath finally slows. It has been a long time since he’s run like that, not since he wanted to be an athlete. He thinks he might have gone farther if he’d kept his habits.

He drops his head into his hands. He’s leaning against a wall of dirt, some steep incline into which the path sharply cuts. Stringy roots tickle the top of his scalp. He draws his feet in, his knees together, but he is not a small man. It is not easy for him to hide.

Cal Rommel turns to stand on his hands and knees. He has found no inner peace, no respite, but he must move on. He crawls for a little while through the mud, until the path begins to climb again and the ravine has been left behind. He uses a tree to push himself to his feet.

He doesn’t try to make any more decisions. He just walks on, sticking his hands in his pockets, digging his heels into the earth as he goes. He’s hunched over, as though by making his passage quiet, he’ll avoid some gaze that searches for him.

His mind searches for something with which to occupy itself, and lands on the thing that incensed him this afternoon, the catalyst that send him running into the woods. He ruminates on it now, with candor rather than rancor. He thinks about it for a long time. The stakes he had set on it, the result that’s come out of it.

He mulls it over, and out of the mull comes a peculiar mood. This thing he had done this afternoon, he had been building toward it for years now. So long, the string had become entangled with different threads, until he’d been dragging a twisted net behind him. He had hoped the weight of it would be removed if he confronted the source, but it had done no such thing. He hadn’t removed the problem, but had tripped himself up.

He tries to think about a time when he hadn’t had this weight behind him. He wants to envision a life without this serpentine knot at his heels. It distresses him that he cannot.

He asks himself if it’s realistic to hope for any solution to this problem. He wonders if by hoping, he only hurts himself by setting himself up for disappointment.

He examines the problem. He holds the net of vipers before him. He sees how there are many problems, not just one, but that the one, the mother viper, has dragged the others with it. He drops the net in disgust.

All at once, he feels utterly exhausted.

He’s been climbing uphill for ages now, and the fatigue comes to him suddenly at the end of his train of thought. He drops to his knees, a short distance due to the hill he's climbing, and slips over to lie on his side. He curls up, seeking smallness, seeking oblivion. He’s sick of this life and sick of this hill and sick of this path. He thinks about returning to the hollow of the ravine and slipping down on purpose.

He calls it an act of cowardice that he does not, that he remains still on the ground, tied up in the fetal position, wrapped all around by chains, nets, snakes.

The sun is almost gone. The world around him is varying shades of grey. He knows the night must be near, and as soon as it comes, he will plunge into absolute darkness and perish in winter’s shadow.

He knows I am on the path. I am ranging up and down these hills, my hills, searching for him. I know he is here. I walk slow, but steadily.

If he stays, I will find him. If he goes, I might miss him. It is this thought that at last brings him back to himself. He pushes himself upright, and slowly climbs to his feet. He begins his plodding trek onward.

Sometime during that span of time, lying on the ground, feeling lost and hopeless, he has lost some fear. It is not a good state of mind he is in. Right now, it is as cold within as it is without. His eyes are uncaring and blank.

The hill peaks and the path turns down a few steps before leveling out and continuing onward. He is at great elevation, and if there were no trees around him, he could gaze out upon the landscape. He could see the layout of the town, even pick out his own house, or the house at which he tried to upend all his problems this afternoon. But even if there were no trees, he would not glance around. His eyes are turned within.

The path widens into a clearing up ahead. His pace slows. He knows I am here. He can see my silhouette on the path. Despite the despair in his chest, he’s unwilling to face me yet. He knows if he meets me now, that will be the end of it.

He thought he had lost his fear, but now it returns, rising quickly like the incoming tide. He falters and hides behind a tree, shrinking in on himself.

I know he is there. I will wait. I am very patient, and I know he won’t run.

He knows this too. In the chaos of panic, thoughts float to the surface as he gasps for air, making themselves known as he struggles not to drown. The first thought that breaks through that maelstrom is I can’t escape this now.

The second is, I have to face it.

The second thought lingers, and does not fade. He grasps onto it for balance. This thought should make him more frightened, but it does the opposite. It gives him a sort of calmness.

Nearly all his choices have been taken away. There is only one left to make now. He must come out from behind this tree and face me. The choice is, who will he be when he does?

Will he be the man with all these weights, all these problems, nets, chains, holding him down as he looks plaintively up, begging for any semblance of control in his life?

Or will he be… not?

He looks down at these burdens he’s been carrying. Just thinking about them on this path made him utterly helpless, paralyzed with desperation. There are too many problems to carry all at once, all the time. He realizes now he’s been a fool to try and shoulder them forever.

He had hoped this afternoon would have given him some help to carry the load… but that’s not how it works.

He can’t simply drop them all, either. They’re stuck into his skin. They’re part of him, and walking away from them would be, in many ways, walking away from himself. And no matter what he would do, they would always come back…

But what if he just left them behind for now? They would come back. He just needs to put them down for a few minutes.

He drops the bundle on the ground, and steels himself.

Something feels wrong.

He eyes the tangle. Then, unsure, he eases an eye around the tree, looking for me.

He sees me. Despite the darkness of the woods, he can see me. He sees my silhouette, my form, my face. He knows my face. He saw it that afternoon.

He feels shock for a moment. Then suddenly, it makes sense to him. He understands who I am - in this moment, at least.

He turns back to the tangle at his feet. The best way to undo a knot, he realizes, is to unwrap it one piece at a time.

He picks at the threads that have, one by one, woven themselves into the main string. It’s gotten so thick, it’s become a rope. It’s that one he needs right now, and that one alone. It’s difficult work. His fingers are numb with cold, and they’re trembling slightly. He still hasn’t eaten for most of the day. It's not easy what he's doing, and not solely because his body has these limitations.

At last, the untressed rope spools before him, free.

He gazes down at it expectantly, desperately. He had hoped for some feeling of resolution, a revelation that what’s doing is the right thing. The turmoil does not cease. There is no sense of “rightness” to his actions. I am waiting around this tree…

He raises his head and peers around the trunk again. He’s scared, he’s frightened, he’s not ready for this, he can’t let this go wrong.

He’s not ready, but he’s not going to get any readier.

He steels himself. Just for a minute. Then he slips out from behind the tree.

He walks slowly to the center of the clearing where I am standing. His eyes are down, his shoulders caving in. He stops when he is two paces away from me.

Then, carefully, he looks up.

A string of emotions flutter through his expression. He thought he knew what I was. I am not what he expected. I am the thing that drove him into this forest, this he knew. But I am not her, as well. If it had been something different than she that had sent him careening down the forest path, I would have been something different too.

He does not understand, but he understands enough, because I am looking down at him with her face, but without her face. I have her head, her halo, her presence, but between my forehead and my chin there is a blank slate of nothing. He knows what this means, and he knows why it chills him all the way through, why he recoils so viscerally.

He swallows and keeps his eyes on me.

This moment of contact seems to stretch, even for me. There is a process going on within Cal Rommel in this moment that he could never verbalize, not even to himself.

And at the end of the moment, his shoulders relax. He knows what to do.

He holds up the rope, the figurative rope at the center of his problems, and says, “You can have this back.”

I do not move.

“I’m sorry about what I said at your house,” he continues. His face is ashen, but his eyes are steady. “I’ve thought about you for - for years, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop caring about you. But I approached you because I thought you could fix my problems, and that wasn’t fair, that wasn’t right. I’m sorry about that too.”

He regards me for a moment, then coils and drops the rope at my feet. His hands tremble for a second, then slow. When he straightens, he feels lighter.

He returns his eyes to me, and this time instead of looking within himself, he studies me, curious. He knows what I’m not, but he doesn’t know what I am. I have not moved since he came into this clearing, though he knows I have been searching, waiting for him. He knows that this is my forest path, and now, his.

A curious expression of pity crosses over his face.

Time settles over our shoulders like a silent snowfall.

I have never been beheld for so long, with such sympathy, when he finally breaks away. He gracefully steps around me and walks down the path toward the end, and he does not look back. I watch him go.

I know what will happen when he comes to the end of this path. It will end suddenly, abruptly, as though he had come back to the beginning, in the middle of the untamed woods. He will wonder fleetingly if it was a dream before fighting his way through the brush to a nearby highway. It will be dark night, but the moon will provide him a path of its own and send him safely home. His roommate has been worried about him, and when he returns to his apartment, he collapses into a hug to his roommate’s surprise. With a muffled voice, Cal Rommel will ask, finally, for the first time, if the roommate will refer to him as they and them instead. Whatever else Cal Rommel is, they aren’t a man, and they’re ready to find out what, and who, they really are.

I know the things that are to happen, and I shan’t follow Cal Rommel to their home, not for a long time, if ever. I shuck the face that Cal Rommel ran from, and I tuck the rope at my feet into my robes. Once again, I begin my long stride down the forest path.