When I was younger, the woods near my house seemed like a great forest. The trees, thick and lush, would overflow onto the muddy path. My dad would take my cousins and I on treacherous hikes into another dimension where anything was possible. Fighting through tall brush and climbing up unexplored mountains, we’d become more than ourselves.
He’d tell us stories of when he was a teenager. How he and his friends would explore these same woods. They built a fortress out of old couches and rugs left to rot on curbsides, the remnants of which could still be found near my Aunt’s house, a portal to another time. He’d tell of the fires they built on Saturday nights and the neighborhood kids he hung out with. They owned these woods, kings in their own right, like the Pevensies in Narnia.
After spending our Sunday family barbeques exploring new lands, fighting battles with demons and monsters, traveling back in time, my sisters and I would collapse into our parent’s massive bed. My mom would roll her eyes at my father’s indulgence as he told us just one more story about the girls who ran with dinosaurs, fighting evil monsters with sharp teeth and claws and protecting those who wished only to live in peace.
We would drift off to sleep believing our father knew all the impossible secrets of the magical forest down the road, and that all the evils of the world looked like ugly beasts.
Now we’re all grown up and my father’s stories are less magical. With a whiskey in his hand, he repeats the same horrors time and time again until I can see the tears pooling in his eyes. They weren’t monsters he fought, but men. I can remember the wonderous lens with which I used to view his past and I cringe, it’s clear now that he never lived a fairytale or experience a great adventure, instead he was forced to endure eerie normalcy laced with incessant tragedy. And now even the woods have lost their glamour. What once seemed so vast and filled with extraordinary possibilities are thinning. No matter how deep you go you can always see the mundane houses on either side, the rocky mountains are only small hills and the tall brush is just grass and poison ivy.
I can’t tell the monsters from people when I walk down the street and it isn’t as easy to be brave as it sounded in my father’s bedtime stories.
I lay awake some nights until the sun begins to rise, bringing streaks of pink light into my room, and I live in moments between reality where I can still feel the rush of adrenaline from great battles that never existed outside my mind. But with the practiced courage I once thought I’d use to fight nightmarish creatures, I instead will myself to open my eyes, get out of bed, and face a new day.
