Gravity’s Pull
Alone, she pushed herself up the escalating path through the colony of birch. As she would pass each tree she swore that she saw eyes gazing back at her through the cracked white bark. The sky above the silhouetted trees was a cloudless azure. The light greens of the grass that grew out of the small trail she was following which although beautiful, was not very worn. Natalie thought that the freshly risen grass seemed alien against the dark brown earth that it was trying to hide. She would pass bushes full of those small apple-red berries, the ones that looked like tiny little candies, seemingly safe to pick right of the bush, yet as poisonous as the deathly toxic bite of the crimson bellied widow. She breathed deeply as she continued up the trail.
The trees seemed to hide her, to swallow her up and it felt as if she were a flea walking through a valley of bleached hair. Her legs were beginning to ache, to burn as if little beads of fire were spontaneously sprouting all along her thighs and calves beneath her skin. She had traveled this hike before, such a long time ago, but for some reason this already traveled path felt foreign to her.
She burst out of the birch forest without a breath in her lungs. She had come to the top of the tree line and now all she could see was the barren mountains of rock above her. The weathered, earth toned rocks were jagged-edged giants. It was only a bit farther till she would reach the hiker’s view that would look out upon the mountains.
She pushed herself just a little more, she had not realized that she had become so out of shape as she wiped her sweat-glistened forehead and realized how wet the fabric between her arms and the top of her back had become.
Finally she arrived at her destination. With one twist of the head she could see both the bustling town of Boulder as well as all the small valleys created by the dominating mountain ranges. There was a small wooden fence against the edge of the view, bordering the viewers from the deathly plummet down the side of the mountain. In front of it was a wooden bench. The bench was worn and chipped and had small carved messages all over it. Initials encompassed by hearts and separated by addition signs or more hearts, as if love was what separated the owner of each initial. She sat on the bench, feeling the carved scribbles with her supple fingertips, wondering why any man-made wooden object seemed to call out for such small, shallow impressions for love. Even the fence seemed to have been penetrated with various Swiss army knives. She sat and gazed, eyes out of focus, into the mountainous wilderness.
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It was a lazy Sunday and the sixteen year old Natalie Thamel sat in her family’s living room looking through her family’s photo albums. The album she was looking through at the moment was her mother and father’s wedding. Beautiful, handsome, sweet, and cute were the words that drifted through Natalie’s mind as she flipped through each page, admiring her mother and father, her parents before she had known them and before they had thought of her.
“Honey, what are you doing? Why aren’t you off with Susan or Kristie?” came her mother’s voice as she walked around the corner, carrying her sketchbook.
“I’m just admiring you and Dad, you two were so cute. I’m pretty sure Susan is at church and Kristie is out on a date with some other guy. You know, the weekly ritual,” replied Natalie, “and plus, sometimes you just need to take some time and relax at home. What’ch ya drawing today?”
Her mother laughed as she sat down on the lengthy family-room couch, opposite of Natalie “Alright Natalie, but you better not be here all day and miss out on this beautiful sunny day or else you will be grounded. “I started messing around with elephants. I think it will turn out pretty interesting. Did you know that elephants will cry and bury their mates? I just read it in National Geographic. How amazing is that? Sometimes I feel people just don’t realize how extraordinary a thing like a relationship is. Even animals understand it but I feel like people forget. You can’t lose a relationship, whether it is between friends, family or lovers. A relationship only dies if one of the two gives up. You can lose just about anything and it can be the fault of someone else, but to lose your relationship with a friend takes effort, it takes a will. Even a dormant friendship that has been asleep for years can be revived, all it takes is effort.”
“Okk mom, you and your rants,” said Natalie, “jeeesh.”
“I may rant, Natalie, but that does not mean that I am wrong!” exclaimed Natalie’s mom, as she threw a pillow at her daughter.
Natalie shielded with the photo album and went back to flipping through memory-lined pages. She flipped through the rest of the wedding album looking at the weird hair styles of all of her parent’s friends and siblings and then she saw her grandmother. Her grandmother died when Natalie was only 8 and she could remember snowy Christmases at her house and the delicious pumpkin pies that she baked, but there was not very much else. Natalie knew she loved her, but she had a hard time remembering her.
“Mom, what about our relationship with people that have died?” asked Natalie.
Her mom looked up from the sketch book, her light auburn hair sliding off of her face, a slight glimmer from the bright sun outside. The way she looked at Natalie made it seem as if she knew who and what had sparked the question.
“Those relationships are the hardest, Natalie. I don’t know if that relationship goes both ways, I only know that it is still up to you to keep it. It’s very hard to keep a relationship when you don’t know if the other is there. Natalie, I’ll be straight with you, I don’t know what is out there, beyond, I don’t know if I ever will. That is what makes it so hard. But imagine if there is something, how strong will your relationship be if you can keep it alive even when the other half is dead?”
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Natalie looked over into the valley. It had been years since the last time she had viewed this sight.
Life was so different then, she thought, why did this have to happen?
Natalie’s family had died in a plane crash on the way home from a vacation in California. Natalie had been away at college in Minnesota when they had crashed. It was here in these mountains, on their way to the Denver airport that somehow the airplane had fallen to its destruction, and to the death of everyone on the plane. It was late January when the family had left. Natalie was jealous that her sister could go and she could not. Natalie was unsure if she still was.
I want to believe that they are ok, thought Natalie, I want to believe that they are watching over me, but I just don’t know if I can. I want them to know that I still love them, that I miss them, that I would give anything to see their smiles, their laughs, the Thamel sky-blue eyes, all together. All of them. Together.
Natalie then stood up and walked up to the fence and leaned against, gazing into the valley.
“I can’t get them out of my mind,” said Natalie. “Every time I think of Dad’s smile, those perfect dimples of his. Like little twinkles etched across his face every time he smiled. Natasha and her gossip, her knack for making anything and everything a riot. Mom. Her ability to change the mood in any conversation. She could make take the most serious conversation, flip it on its back, and answer any question as if she had known it her entire life. Her lovable wisdom, her accepting embrace. Every time I think of them, I feel as if my soul cracks, like the splitting of a rock in a crackling fire pit. I don’t want to forget them but I don’t want to remember them.”
And as Natalie looked down from her perch, she felt nauseated from the height. As she looked down, three tears dripped like a burst shot from an assault rifle. The tears fell onto the wooden fence, right into the center of a carved heart, right between an engraved “T.H.” and a pocket knife imprinted “K.H.”. The tears landed on the addition sign that separated them.
“How can I live without them? Even thinking of them reminds me how I don’t have them. Mom always talked about relationships and about keeping them but how can I if it is this hard? This painful?” And suddenly, a question, What if I joined them?, jumped into Natalie’s mind like a torched popcorn kernel. She was taken by surprise at this thought. It did not seem to be hers, yet at the same instance, it was comforting. Is it worth it? Is death worth it to see them?
Talking to herself like a child talking to their imaginary friend, “If it hurts to think of them and if it not thinking of them means me giving up on our relationship, how can I live? Either I try my hardest to forget, and lose the one thing in this world that I love, or I live in the torture of my nostalgia? Or…I can give up everything, no…not everything, the only thing I have to gain is my family, the only thing I lose is the feeling of them.”
Natalie thought for the first time in months that she could feel happy. What if she could see them?
What is life but the relationships with the ones you love, anyway? Isn’t even the possibility of happiness with the promise of death infinitely more pleasing than the assurance of constant torture that is fueled by life?
And with this thought running marathons through her mind with the consistency of gravity, she felt relief. She could feel her back ease up and her breath slow down.
Do I have anything to lose? They can be there…
“They can be out there.”
Natalie carefully climbed over the fence, and stood on the four foot ledge that sandwiched her between life and death. She lifted her hands off of the love engraved fence, and raising them horizontally to her sides like branches of a petrified tree, she closed her eyes.
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