I built us a house, deep in the woods, where nobody would find us. This house, I built it from logs I chopped myself. I chopped day and night, until the webbing between my thumb and index finger was nothing more than raw skin ready to callous. Our house, it wasn’t much, but I had the blisters to prove that isn’t nothing. It would be our house, deep in the woods, far away from it all.
What is it all?
Well ‘it’ is the perfectly tailored rosebushes and manicured lawns, the pesticides that stunted growth and killed ladybugs, the white painted fences boxing away each square acre in some uniform neighborhood. ‘It’ was the big pearly smiles of neighbors watering gardens, women wiping their Palmolive-scented palms against their aprons as they ushered their two-and-a-half kids towards the bus. ‘It’ was the station wagons and sedans, ‘it’ was the urban sprawl, ‘it’ was the strip malls and chain restaurants. ‘It’ was something I’d spent my life trying to escape, because ‘it’ was one big game that everybody just had to play into. But not me, honey, I’m not a person of games.
You told me you knew better though. You said that all the chopping, all the building, it had nothing to do with my hatred of the suburbs. You could see it in my strained brow and tense shoulders that my escape into the woods was a way for me to bury my secrets in pine needles and dirt. And with those eyes, those eyes you give me when you can see right through me, you added:
“There’s no amount of dead leaves and top soil that can’t be washed away by the rain.”
