I can get there on my own. you can leave me here alone.
A family has not made him immune to his crippling need to wander.
To move. His inability to surrender himself to stagnation.
It has not made him immune to his impulses.
And so he steals out of the shadows of Taiga just before dawn, while his daughter and her mother sleep. He kisses the little girl’s head – the only time she lets him close enough to touch her is when she is asleep and perhaps it is wrong for him to exploit her vulnerability but he refuses to think herself unloved. He refuses to condemn her to the same fate he’d faced as a child, despite how fiercely she loathes him. Despite how viciously she hisses and spits her rage and her hatred at him.
And perhaps there is some dark corner of his heart that mourns for the days he’d spent living here in these specific shadows. He knows the patterns of them and how they fall when the sun rises. He has committed them to memory, they are ingrained in the patterns of his DNA. He moves slow through them and revels in all of his remembering. This place he knows, perhaps better than he knows himself. Taiga is still strange and unfamiliar, despite all of the time he has spent there, shackled to the redwoods by some unseen force that he knows he will someday come to resent.
He can see the fog of his breath as he skirts through the forest. There is no snow here, the canopy overhead too thick to permeate, but it is cold just the same. He remembers winters spent out in the open, chest heaving, letting the cold devour him. And now he tucks himself safely away with the girl and her mother, siphons the heat from them, protects himself from the elements as if he has any sense of self-preservation.
He catches sight of her as descends into the darkness, dripping wet. He considers her a long moment, the way the water drips down the length of her face, the way she seems impervious to the cold. “You’ll catch a chill,” he says, his head tilted at a funny angle as he studies her.
BETHLEHEM
I'm just tryin' to do what's right. oh, a man ain't a man unless he's fought the fight.
