The Same Trees

Charlie was leaning coolly back against the kitchen counter when Mia came into the already crowded room, out of breath from the cold, shrugging off her coat with an anxious exigency.

The attendees of the party were outdoorsy, laid back types, packed into the kitchen

drinking IPAs. They wore workers' clothes, Carhartts with tears in their pockets and knees stained with house paint. The men were unshaven but smelled clean, like chalk and pine, and the women had scrubbed, laughing faces and nose piercings. They all had jobs in engineering or farming and looked at life with an unwavering levity. Mia felt like an imposter among these well adjusted people, like a feral cat thrust into domesticity and expected to behave.

I hope you have a lot of fun, Nathan had said on the phone earlier that night, you deserve to go out and not think for a while.

I’ll try, was all she said. Mia knew that he felt guilty for how depressed she had been

lately.

She lingered awkwardly near the entrance until Theo, the host, came over and handed her a beer. Hey, how are you, so happy you made it. A Rihanna song pulsed through a bassy bluetooth speaker. Condensation trickled down the can, making her already cold fingers wet and numb. Then someone called Theo’s name, and he patted Mia on the shoulder and rushed away, leaving her standing in front of Charlie.

Mia and Charlie had crossed paths before, but only obliquely. Until now their lives oscillated in tandem, sine and cosine waves, occasionally touching but never truly overlapping.

She had met her friends at a bar and he was just leaving, or they ran the same Thanksgiving 5K and made small talk at the starting line. Things like that. Tonight, he was wearing a handsome wool sweater and his nose was slightly sunburnt. He looked healthy, like someone who valued fresh air and exercise.

Can I get you a beer?

She held up the can of PBR as a reply.

Oh, we can do better than that.

He swung open the door of the refrigerator with the same confident ease with which he occupied the room and handed her a brown glass bottle with a simple white label.

Here’s the good stuff, he said, winking.

She took the bottle and muttered her thanks.

Mia drank enough that the night blurred together into a stream of interactions, none very distinguishable from another. The world became fragmented, time moving spasmodically, each moment disconnected from the one before. There were tequila shots, she knows, salt licked off a near stranger’s hand, lime wedges sucked dry and discarded in the sink. There was also a long, rambling discussion about Albert Camus’ The Stranger with Charlie and two of his friends, held in a shivery huddle on the back porch over a shared cigarette. Somehow, without meaning to, Mia found herself defending Camus’ absurdism, saying things like: Do you really think our actions mean anything? Like, in the grand scheme of things, does anything we do really matter?

She didn’t particularly agree with this point of view, but, as in many drunken debates, she arbitrarily chose a side for the sake of discussion.

Mia remembers that at one point, Charlie had taken her empty Nalgene bottle, which was resting on the counter beside her, and, without asking, filled it up with tap water from the sink. It was an odd act, so bizarre in its suddenness that it didn’t seem quite real. His movements were quick and self assured, like an acrobat deftly performing a complicated trick.

Around midnight, Mia found her way to a mattress set up on the floor in the corner of the living room with the idea that she might rest for a few minutes before going home. There was a small cluster of boys sitting on the mattress having a philosophical debate about what the government has a right to hide from its citizens. There are things that we don’t need to be told, someone was saying, and not just by the government, but by anyone. Sometimes, lies are less damaging than the truth.

Mia didn’t hear the rebuttal to this because Charlie was lying on the floor with his head on the edge of the mattress like a pillow, looking up at her.

No spots left, he said, I guess we were both too slow.

I guess so.

She laid down next to him, his arm under her head like a pillow. There was no decision making involved at all in this process; she was drunk, and tired, and wanted to lie down, and this was the only place to do so. She felt the muscle and sinew of his bicep move against her head when he adjusted his arm. This didn’t feel consequential at the time.

She lay there, eyes closed but still alert, listening to the conversation happening behind her. It was like a soft rain thrumming on a window nearby; it didn’t seem like there were actually people there, at a party, directly next to her. Charlie was the only one who was really there, she knew because she could feel the warmth emanating off of his body. He smelled sharply energetic, like tobacco smoke and citrus.

Charlie stroked her hair with his fingers. Mia wondered whether he was focusing all his attention on this action, hands tense and eager, or if he was distracted by the conversation, his fingers moving automatically. She thought that she shouldn’t be letting this happen; she had Nathan after all, far away at graduate school on the opposite coast. But this gentle touch, just perceptible across her pulled back hair, felt so kind that it filled her with a sorrowful desire, aching and sweet, and she wanted more than anything for it to continue. She felt that if she so much as moved a muscle, or acknowledged this act of kindness in any way, the moment would be ruined. So she lay perfectly still, breath bated, eyes closed.

Later, Mia told herself that she and Nathan had been growing apart for some time. It is true that the intense desire to please him that she had once felt had faded into a mild intolerance for his irresoluteness. She resented the meek little child that she was around him, whiny and indecisive, although he did nothing to encourage this behavior. At first, it was a pleasurable feeling, like a game; Nathan liked getting what he wanted, and Mia liked giving it to him. But he often didn’t know what he wanted, or found that what he wanted didn’t actually make him happy.

He didn’t ask for her to cater to his every whim, but that’s how it happened, and Mia gradually forgot how to make her own choices. Because of this, Mia had thought that she needed him, but now that he was away, she found that she wasn’t actually that lonely or helpless.

Nathan had fallen in love with someone fearless and independent; she wondered if that is what Charlie saw in her, too. Some part of her knew, though, that she would always devolve into a pitiful, fawning creature when she was in love. There was something in her chemical makeup that made her this way, an intense need to please that was genetic. She had no control over this; it was just a fact, an incurable, fatal flaw.

Mia dozed off with her head on Charlie’s arm, face turned in towards his ribcage. When she awoke, the digital watch on his wrist told her that it was 1:17 AM. The number of party guests had ebbed significantly.

Sorry, Mia whispered blurrily into his fisherman’s sweater.

Oh, it’s no problem. It was nice.

His voice was warm.

Mia smiled, embarrassed. She sat up awkwardly, focusing all of her attention on straightening out her shirt, which had twisted itself bizarrely around her torso. Charlie shook out his arm, flexing his hand and then making a fist, encouraging his blood flow to return.

Mia still felt woozy from the alcohol, her head heavy. Charlie offered to walk her home.

That’s okay, she said, eyes foggy with fatigue. It’s not that long of a walk.

No, please, he said, amused, for me. He stood up, clothes somehow unwrinkled, and

reached out a hand to help her up. I only live a few streets over from you, anyway.

So, the pair said goodbye to what was left of their friends and stepped into the driveway together, zipping their coats to their chins and hiking their shoulders up by their ears. As they walked away, Mia glanced back at the warm, protective light emanating from the windows of the house, soft and merry against the black, frigid night.

Mia and Charlie took the long, winding path along the bay. The cold wind coming off the water had a sobering effect, blowing into their faces so that their skin stung, their cheeks a hard pink under the ebbing and flowing light of the streetlamps. In the summer, this was a pleasant path, arching red maples casting a speckled shade across the walkway, lupines growing among the tall grasses on the bank opposite them. Now, the trees were dark and bare, and the steep slope down to the beach was packed with hard, icy snow. Still, the harshness of the landscape and the smell of cold salt water had a sort of severe beauty.

A year before, a boy Mia had gone to high school with had tried to commit suicide by walking into the ocean not far from here. He swam over a quarter mile into the bay before changing his mind and swimming back to shore. By the time the ambulance came, the hypothermia had set in too deeply, and he had died on the way to the hospital.

Mia had found herself haunted for months by this boy, Connor, even though they had only met in passing, in the dim light of parties in classmates’ basements. Whoever wrote his obituary said that he had lost a long battle with depression. He hadn’t lost, though, she thought, frustrated; he had changed his mind. He had made it all the way back to the beach with severe hypothermia and dialed 911 because his will to live had won out over his illness, but it hadn’t been enough. He made one wrong decision, and it had cost him his life. This delicacy, the proof that a single moment can hold so much weight, frightened her much more than the dying itself.

Looking out over the dark water, Mia felt an immediate emptiness, imbued with the sense that she and Charlie were the only people awake in the whole city. The darkness pressed in on her, the watery moonlight illuminating only the tops of the naked tree branches and glinting harshly over the lapping winter waves. It would be very lonely, she thought, to die here. She wove her hand through Charlie’s arm, real and solid, a comforting reminder that she was not alone.

As she looked out to the frozen beach, Mia’s eyes settled onto a dark shape that lay near the top of the sand. A passer-by not paying attention may have taken it to be a wayward snowbank, but the rest of the snow around reflected the little moonlight and gave off an eerie bluish hue. This was much darker, too soft and curved to be a washed up tree trunk. It was about the size of a human body.

Mia squeezed the muscle of Charlie’s upper arm hard so that he stopped talking mid sentence, the explanation of his current work project lost, evaporating with his foggy breath into the night air.

What is that? Mia pointed down to the beach.

I’m not sure, he said.

Do you think it might be a person? She said, in barely a whisper.

I don’t know, he whispered back, like it was a secret: we should go check.

They scrambled down the icy wooden steps down to the beach. Its organic shape made it obvious that the object was something vertebrate. Mia’s heart beat at a quick staccato; it felt like her bones were vibrating. There was an acerbic taste at the back of her throat. The air smelled marine and sharp, like rotting seaweed. Frozen sand crunched under their boots. Mia had the hilarious, fleeting thought that this sounded like cereal being chewed; then a much stronger thought, steeped in dread, overwhelmed her senses: I don’t want to see a dead body. A panicky clamminess enveloped her.

The pair edged closer to the shadowed object, Mia squeezing Charlie’s hand, trying to make herself invisible by walking a step behind him. She resisted the urge to run in the other direction. When they were about five feet away from the thing, Charlie took out his phone and switched on the flashlight feature.

The body was about five feet long, covered in dark speckles, smooth and fleecy. Mia could see now the flippers tucked up against its blubbery body, the black snout; it was a seal. Its tail twitched gently. It was alive, asleep, inhuman.

A wave of relief swept over Mia, extinguishing all adrenaline. Suddenly drained of energy, she felt limp and wrung out, like a wet rag. Shivering, teeth chattering, she wrapped her arms around Charlie and buried her face in his chest. Frustratingly, she felt tears sting her eyes, spilling out onto her icy cheeks.

All I could think was that I didn’t want to see a dead body, she whispered into his coat.

I think that that’s a fair thought to have. Charlie gently brushed her hair off her forehead with his calloused thumb.

I’m relieved too.

You don’t think it’s incredibly self centered?

Self centered? He asked. His other hand, the one that wasn’t in her hair, was planted

firmly on her back. It felt like a tether holding her in place.

Well, that might have been a person, with a life, and a family, and friends who would mourn them. Their lives would be changed forever because they lost someone they loved, and all I could think was that I wanted to run away because I didn’t want to see something frightening. It just seems, I don’t know... selfish.

I don’t think that that’s selfish, I think it’s human. Charlie’s voice was soft and understanding, as if he was speaking to a child. Seeing something like that changes your life just because of- of what it is. That’s why it’s so scary; it’s power comes from just existing.

Mia felt ashamed at her weakness. She couldn’t understand why she always acted so childish, why she was falling apart when he was so stoic and calm. She wiped her eyes brusquely with the back of her hand and looked up at Charlie’s face. Even in the dark, his eyes were warm.

Casting around for something to say, she whispered: I’ve never seen a seal that big before.

No, I haven’t either. He said, laughing at her change in demeanor. It’s kind of beautiful.

He had let her move past the moment. This kind of graciousness was foreign, and Mia felt sure she was undeserving of it. His hand was still in her hair, thumb against her temple. She felt a familiar servility, frustratingly crushing. She stood perfectly still, body tensed like a trained animal waiting for a command, or maybe more like a deer in headlights.

Are you going to kiss me now? She asked.

The next morning nothing was different. The sun rose over the same trees that it rose over every day, and it cast a blurry orange light over the grainy dawn. Mia made coffee and drank it sitting on her couch, just as she always did. The couch was threadbare and blue, as it had been the day before. Her body was functioning as usual: lungs inflating, blood circulating, cells cycling.

Mia looked blankly out of her window, legs pulled into her chest. There was a small purple bruise on the side of her knee; she pressed her finger mindlessly into it. Her head hurt and she had dark bags like wine stains under her eyes. She dug her chin into her shoulder; her shirt smelled faintly electric, like cigarettes and citrus. She felt deflated, like a punctured soccer ball lying forgotten in the corner of someone’s lawn.

She thought, somehow, that the world would be completely transformed today. Not just that she would be a different person, but that the actual chemical makeup of the earth would have perceptibly changed. But she didn’t feel like a different person, irrevocably altered or condemned. She knew, logically, that things would be different now, maybe even that she had set her whole life on a new trajectory. But the feeling of sameness was comforting, a sort of confirmation that, at least when it came to the structural integrity of society, her choices were insignificant. It was as though she had gained some sort of previously undiscovered control over her life.

While they were talking about The Stranger, Charlie had watched Mia attentively while she made her point through chattering teeth. When she suggested that nothing people do really matters in the grand scheme of things, he had frowned thoughtfully.

Slowly, like he was testing the flavor of each word in his mouth before he spoke it, he said, it does matter, though. What I do, at least, matters to me.