Wild Greens

The Secret Life of Avoidant Cutlery

by Colleen T. Reese

"Turn right on Towanda Trail," said the virtual assistant as she interrupted some moody folk singer playing in my headphones. I was 32 years old and still using Google Maps to take a ten-minute walk from the Airbnb I was renting to a beach in Arrowhead Lake. A canoe named Chippy was fabled to be waiting there, a dark green three-person canoe that I planned to drag into the lake on my own.

As with Chippy, I was convinced that using Google Maps for this ten-minute walk held some deeper meaning than it really did. This feeling was expected. It had been years since I sat down and tried to write seriously. Throughout the week, I kept catching myself grasping at every moment that passed, desperately searching for meaning. The coffee I drank, the meals I ate each evening, the decor of the house, the wool-blend of my socks, the wine I selected, the sun in the windows, the unplugged television. This was the first trip I had ever taken by myself. I felt it with each inconsequential step.

After the first turn, I had already noticed several motorcycles parked in the neighborhood. I always looked for them in places like this one. I took comfort in the idea that somewhere among the manicured lawns was an underbelly, beckoning like a gentle and dark whisper for people like me. But, despite the occasional leather vest or startling sound of an engine turning over, I felt like a spy caught behind enemy lines. Was it obvious that I didn’t belong here? I looked around at the babbling water features and neatly paved driveways. 

To my relief, most of the houses were empty along the walk to the beach. The only people I found were appliance techs and cleaners on their way to flip the houses in between renters. I had reserved the cabin for the week after Labor Day for this very reason. \ I always liked to operate this way: I vacationed in the fall almost exclusively; I never went to the beach; I prefered the night shift; I enjoyed drinking in the middle of the day. My desires in life were almost exclusively voyeuristic, like an unimportant secret I couldn’t wait to keep.

People in my generation are quick to pathologize these behaviors as avoidant. It's as if any deviations from the very social structures we've deemed as violent (at best) are still nothing short of a disease to be sought out and treated. We do this with particular vigor these days, to the point where it's almost a parody, a first date question. 

"What's your attachment style?" the woman in my imagination asks me from across the table. She is well dressed and definitely makes more money than I do. In this maladaptive daydream, I don’t have the perfect retort for her frankly obtuse question. Instead, I am more curious if she had considered that many of us are hesitant to give up the paltry and strange benefits afforded to us when whatever triggering event thrust us out of the bosom of normalcy and called us "other." Benefits that included a unique vantage point, resourcefulness  and, above all, intrigue. Infinite, delicious intrigue. 

I gave up on the argument before it went on for too long in my head. I had other things to worry about, like finding and unlocking this fucking canoe when I got to the beach. But, when I arrived at the beach, it was empty.

"BEACH CLOSED AS A PRECAUTIONARY MEASURE DUE TO HIGHER THAN ACCEPTABLE LEVELS OF COLIFORM," the sign read.

It was enough to make me reconsider the coffee and canoeing for the day. I sat, awkwardly, on the sandy beach behind the cautionary sign. I had no chair or blanket, just the long hiking jacket I was wearing. At least it covered most of my legs.

They call what I was doing that week deep work, which refers to time spent away from distractions in order to pursue a singular effort. I never imagined that I would be able to do something like this when I was younger. There was, of course, the idea of money to contend with first of all. (I never imagined making any.) And secondly, I wanted to be a writer so I assumed that my life would always be deep work. It never occured to me that I might become a bad writer and need to pour a month’s rent into disappearing an hour away from my home to even try.

But there I was, a thirtysomething-year-old woman, scribbling in a notebook stacked on top of a bright orange dry bag stuffed with Bolaño and Murakami and granola. I must have looked wholly unprepared. I felt like the people around me could smell it, that my presence might even be unnerving to them. It was a familiar feeling.

"Your writing reminds me of a sharp knife," Jess said over the phone.

Jess was a writer too, and much better at it than I was. We worked together at an advertising agency a few years ago. The job was one of the worst I've ever had but it bonded us and so I didn't feel shy about asking her to edit a meandering story I had written about my alcoholic father who passed away from liver cancer. At the time, I found her note complimentary. This was the most important pain that I had ever felt in my life (or at least I thought so at the time). I wanted that pain to be clean and sharp and specific. 

I spent most of my young life this way: convinced that it was a good and honorable thing to understand pain. I wrote about pain. Listened to music about heartbreak. I was fascinated by sculpture—anything that felt like stripping something down. I remember the moment when I recognized that adults would pay extra attention when I wrote something about pain, as if they could already see it tattooed on my fingers. This one won’t carry it well. 

Eventually, I became convinced that the path to self-actualization was subtractive too, like those art forms I adored so well. All I had to do was cut out the impurities. I was something like a homing pigeon for my pain. I could always find it and I didn't hesitate when it came to wielding it against myself or others.

As I turned Jess’s feedback over in my mind, I began to think of myself like a knife—a tool suitable only for very specific tasks. You don't just keep knives lying around with a deck of cards or the blanket you use to keep warm at night. That would be absurd. You put them in a drawer with the other knives. 

Imagine, for instance, arriving at a friend's house and seeing a knife in an unexpected place. The knife itself is fairly banal, but it doesn't belong out in the open with no one attending to it. And maybe it's not so banal. Most normal people are unnerved by the presence of any unfamiliar knife. Perhaps this is why I found it all so difficult, to understand and be understood.

Like the unfamiliar kitchen knife, I unnerve the people around me. I have a lot of friends who find it generally uncomfortable to be alone with me. I can see it, you know. The shift in their posture, the way they balance their weight from one foot to the other. To be fair, the act has always been poor on my part, punctuated by bursts of poor attempts at people pleasing or sometimes outright lying. I’m not going to do anything with the knife, I’m just holding it! Really, it’s a testament to their character and intelligence. They are not easily fooled. 

There are, of course, people who are very comfortable handling knives, even unfamiliar knives. I like to think of these people as handlers. And handlers are even rarer than knives. That’s what keeps the circle small. This is how alternative and subcultures work. 

But then you go out into the real world and you have to ask yourself if being a knife is enough for you. Is it enough, to only be useful and welcome in very specific scenarios and otherwise stashed in a drawer with the other tools. Were we all so unimaginative that there could be no fulfilling life for us, the sharper people? The night people? The metalheads and wasteoids? The traumatized? Would we really spend a whole life outside of the normal flow of things, collecting these little beautiful moments that no one else would ever see or feel or touch?

As I peered at the sixty-year-old woman who had suddenly materialized next to me with her boat hat and arduous-looking paperback, I could only answer yes. It was enough for me. In fact,  if I was as honest as I would need to be to accomplish what I came here to do, I would have to finally admit that I choose these alien and anonymous little seconds over acceptance from the people I know and love every time. 

“Do you care if I smoke,” I asked her. And I held my breath, unsure if I had miscalculated her. The heavy book. The oversized shirt. 

“Sure. But don’t let those guys in the carts catch you. They’ll fine you for smoking on the beach.” She replied with a smile. I could see that some of her molars were filled with metal. 

“Do you want one?” I extended my hand toward her. She declined before I could fully extend my arm. I shuffled a few steps away to make sure I was downwind of her. As I exhaled, she peered at me from behind her sunglasses. We both smiled. It wasn’t hard to look her in the eyes.

“My daughter would hate it. She doesn’t like it when I smoke,” she said after a few moments.

“Makes sense.”

You see, some of us are marked forever and in no rush to disfigure ourselves back into some perverse imitation of our more palatable selves. It’s not just the trauma that marks you, after all. It’s the hard-won beauty of a new perspective all the years after that leaves fingerprints on your cheeks. 

A relaxed moment with a woman in a boat hat. The way the city feels when it’s asleep and I’m still awake. The purple humor of the edges of a party. That sweet, strange smugness that comes with the knowledge that not everyone makes a full recovery. Learning this is like possessing a secret knowledge, one that lays bare the world around you. They need us, it speaks. To keep the knowledge and reflect it back at them. To show them what they look like from the outside.

On the way back from the beach, I passed by an older biker who looked like a grittier version of Sam Elliott. I knew it was customary in these kinds of communities to wave at people as they passed. (The gesture would normally gross me out but I felt a kinship with the biker.) I flashed him a peace sign, my head tilted up in a knowing nod. He took his right hand off of the handlebars and crossed his chest in a wave, amused if not a little nonplussed, as if he could have spotted me from a mile away. Was it in alarm? Communion? Understanding? Most of all, I wondered if he could hear it too, like the woman on the beach… that little voice in the back of his head.

Knife! Knife! Knife!

Polarity or Leaving

by Jessica Doble

Akureyri

By Clara Peterson

Somehow, despite the wind, we chattered merrily, like two best friends who hadn’t seen each other for a year. Or, maybe, I did most of the chattering. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember the wind stealing the words from our ears with the same icy tentacles that whipped the pom-poms on our wool hats while our boots crunched on a hard layer of ice that was rapidly getting buried in fluffy new fall. 

“A-wheeeeeee-oooooh!” Kíra let out a Viking scream, and I snapped around just in time to see her charge forward, toward the cliff-face.

“Kíra!” I screamed. 

She stopped like she’d run into a wall, arrested by a gust of wind that pushed her back toward me in a fit of ruddy laughter.

“Try it!” she laughed.

I took a tentative step in that direction. I was never the daring one. Feeling the force of the wind, I leaned into it. I guffawed. “The wind is holding my whole body weight!” I cried. Kíra walked closer to the edge. She leaned, and the wind held her too. 

“Kíra, careful!” I admonished. She leaned backward and immediately tumbled into the snow. I followed suit, letting the force of the wind push me backward too, and I tumbled into the snow next to Kíra. We laughed and rolled toward each other like two kids having a sleepover on a bed of snow. 

“Do you like it here?” I asked solemnly. Kíra let out a hoot. I knew she was thinking of old times, when I would suddenly get serious after a day of careening antics. ‘Questions with Anna,’ she’d always called it.

“It’s no Kyle Avenue!” she said. I smiled. She was always doing that, looking out for my feelings first. “I don't know, it's been kind of lonely. I miss you! But I’m getting to know my cousins and, like, my culture. It feels like a treasure hunt on one of those old-timey maps! And I’m an explorer on the winding trail!” 

“Is it worth it? When you’re lonely?”

“Well, I met this girl Margrét who’s really cool, and I think we’re going to be good friends. You’ll meet her!”

“Oh…That’s great!” I said with a little too much effort.

“Not best friends! Of course,” she clarified. 

“Whatever, you’ve already thrown me to the wolves of high school,” I joked. 

“Then be a tiger!” Kíra roared as loud as she could; the wind whooshed it away.

“I might have to lose the glasses string,” I mused.

“Nooo! The glasses string is quintessential Anna.” 

I sighed and sat up in the snow. I gazed out at the clean blue ribbon of the fjord, spooling through a valley between sprawling mountains, endless black rock and scraggly grass now cloaked in dramatic white. The homes nestled into the mountain base on the other side were trim and modest. Not a Walmart to be seen. Not a single strip mall in the entire drive from Reykjavik to Akureyri. Just small towns, open land, mountains, and rock. I took a deep breath and savored it.

“Nope,” I said, doubling back, “Absent your protection, I can’t keep wearing my glasses on a string around my neck.”

“Anna Peterson, you don’t need my protection!” Kíra proclaimed. She jumped up, extended a green-mittened hand, and pulled me to my feet. Her bright blue eyes watered from the wind, shining with their perpetual mischief.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“Not too much!” Now with each step, we plunged to mid-calf. The light began to change. Our shadows grew longer. Occasionally, the sun slipped behind peaks of the mountain that rose to our left, casting a dark film over the diamond snow. I looked up at the mountain’s dwarfing presence as the sun fell lower in the sky, and I shivered. Kíra had told me how avalanches started with a little crumb of snow tumbling down the mountain, growing bigger and gaining speed until it was a huge white mass, rushing down, crushing everything in its path. We had to be careful of avalanches, she’d said. Not that there was much we could do about it if we saw one coming, I’d thought glumly.

“Here’s the path to the top!” Kíra cried. Straining my eyes through accelerating snowfall, I could see a pathway of flatter ground between two peaks that led around the side and up, with a steep climb near the top. Kíra forged ahead, and I tried to keep up. Taking a deep breath, I turned onto the path... and was met by a surprising, quiet serenity. With a rock face blocking the wind on either side of us, the ferocious rush softened to a whisper. The snow, catching on cliffs above, filtered down in a gentle flutter. We trekked on. 

Red-faced, we rounded a sudden bend and lost the protection of the second face. The wind whipped out like a laser and pushed us back. Gasping, I heaved my weight forward and realized with a sinking feeling that I’d lost sight of my friend. I pushed forward, looking for a snowy figure, or a flash of green mitten. “Kíra!” I called out to her. The snow formed a moving surface that swirled around my boots and up all around me, stinging my cheeks like pinpricks. My heart was beating quickly.

A barely-perceptible, “Almost there!” reached my ears. And then... the snow slowed... and we emerged together — into a moonlight so bright it was almost a silver sun. Below shone the golden light of a hundred miniature houses on the other side of the now-black fjord. I thrust my arms into the air and threw my head back — like Leo in Titanic, which we had seen together in 5th grade.

“I’m the queen of the woooorld!” I yelled. 

Something hard and cold hit my cheek. I whirled around to see Kíra cackling with delight, already packing her next snowball. I grabbed a fistful of snow, mashed it together, and lobbed it in her direction. I missed.

Laughing even harder, Kíra ran over and grabbed my hand. Her green mitten and my purple glove clasped tight. 

“LEAN!” she cried. We stretched our arms to their full combined wingspan and leaned all our weight into the winter wind. And I felt it rush around me and over me and through me until I became part of it — fierce, fearless, indestructible.