Into the Unknown Woods
by Lily Bussel
I eyed him as I spoke. Looking for any sign, any hint that would betray how he felt. Each word I had memorized, planned and practiced for three months prior to this moment.
But he, stoic as always, gave nothing away.
He could be angry, depressed, thoughtful, melancholy, cheerful or annoyed but one would never know. The only clue that sometimes gave him away was the crinkles that would form next to his eyes when he was about to smile.
I was working in New York at my dream job. He was in grad school in the West. We flew back and forth in the winter and spring and summer. You couldn’t pick two more opposite places or people. I was a copywriter who spent late nights writing commercials about lattes and cat food. He was studying to save threatened environments and fight for indigenous people’s rights. I had an insatiable sweet tooth. He considered an avocado a dessert. What we shared though was a love of reading, conversation, travel, omelets in the early morning, and an affinity for log cabins in the middle of nowhere.
In my previous relationships, I had always broken up with the other because something else, usually school, took priority. A neuropsychology course took Todd down. A renaissance lit class was the door for Miles. I didn’t, and couldn’t, sacrifice a paper, a project, a grade for someone. Then again, I hadn’t met someone who I’d be willing to sacrifice something for.
I’d been a rational person before Sam. I’d let reason (and the university’s course catalogue) guide me. I thought with my head because it wasn’t messy. It was comfortable, logical, known. To think with your head means to avoid the tug of the heart. To follow the path that protects you. That keeps you safe from the brambles dotted with thorns that draw blood and the knotted arms of twisted trees that line the path just out of reach of ensnaring you. This path is reassuring and lit and ends exactly where you intended, at the precise coordinates you inputted before you set off.
The other path isn’t one. To think with your heart is to surrender to something you’re unsure of. To think with your heart is to set off into the woods with only your bare hands to forge a way. It means tiptoeing at times and running madly at others. It means blisters that turn into calluses and scrapes that become reminders of what you braved to get somewhere you hadn’t planned on. Here, there are no concrete coordinates. No definite finish. It may end in someone’s arms who pulls the brambles from your hair and rubs the dirt from your bloodied knees. It may end in a frantic kiss on a doorstep. It may end in angry tears and empty beds with knotted covers. But that’s how it is with this path: you don’t really know.
And when you let the heart lead, this is the risk you take.
When I met Sam I was still a head thinker. I was finishing my thesis and packing my tiny house in preparation to move to New York. I didn’t know that there was an alternative to being a Head. Or rather, I didn’t think that anything else could precede it.
We were sitting across from each other eating pizza, talking about our dream houses–where they were, what the kitchen was like, what kind of wood the floors would be made from. I looked at Sam as he spoke: his long hair brushed his shoulders and the edge of a tattoo peeked out from his shirtsleeve. As he described his dream home–a tiny log cabin with a wood-burning stove–I felt something start to shift. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I realize now that it was the beginning of my heart taking me by the hand and leading me into the woods. The unknown, untraveled woods.
It was these woods that led me to speak the words that would be the undoing of us, the unraveling of the ties that had bound us together.
“I want to move to Montana,” I said a year and a half later.
We were unhappy flying back and forth. The weeks together were wonderful: biking around empty tree lined streets in Southampton, building chicken runs outside his home in Montana, and squeezing into crowded corners of Katz’s deli on Christmas, nibbling roast beef sandwiches and munching on plates of pickles. These visits were too short. The days ended too quickly. The drives to the airport and bus stations always left one of us looking out and the other looking back.
Moving was the only solution for two people whose probability of geographic paths intersecting was as likely as Mordor putting a “Welcome Frodo!” sign out front.
I watched him as I proposed my idea. I was ready to give up the job, the city, the lifestyle. I had thought about it and the repercussions. What I would gain and what I would lose. I knew that if we broke up in a few months at least I had given it a shot because that’s what I thought it, we, deserved: a real shot at being in a relationship that didn’t take place over crackly Skype calls and hurried voice mails. My heart had led me to a clearing in the woods where the air was still and the light filtered through the trees. In this spot, at this point, I realized that I had met someone who I was willing to sacrifice something for.
I expected his eyes to crinkle around the edges. I expected him to lean across the table and look me in the eyes and say something like, “ok then.”
He called ten days later.
“Lily, I don’t think you should move here,” he said.
I crumpled in the chair I was sitting on in my apartment in Brooklyn as he spoke of his schoolwork and my job and the unknown. Always the unknown. How would I feel if we broke up and I had given this job up? What would we do if he got a job in South America and we had to move again? He couldn’t feel comfortable with me giving up something so big to move there. I couldn’t understand how he couldn’t understand that that would be on me. On my shoulders. By my choice. I hung up after an hour and crept into bed, the sticky July air pouring in through the open window.
We didn’t talk for half a year. Or rather I didn’t want to talk. In January we were both in Oregon for the holidays. We sat on a bench in a park across from the tiny home I had lived in the year before.
“The way you thought was really beautiful Lily, but sometimes I felt like I had to do the logical thinking for both of us,” he stared straight ahead, his hair pulled back into his usual bun.
Beautiful? I thought. The way that I thought was beautiful?
If the alternative to beautiful was rational then I didn’t want to be it. I didn’t want to be a Head. I wanted to be a Heart. I’d been the Head and I saw where those relationships went and didn’t go. They were guarded and measured and passionless. Being a Head had interfered with my ability to fall in love. It had given me a guidebook and told me what steps to take. It led me through the woods on the same path over and over and over again.
I don’t think being a heart thinker exempts you from being rational. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. To be a heart does not mean to run blindly into the woods. It means acknowledging that, maybe, the head doesn’t know everything.
We Hearts are not without our heads. We have a different rationale: if we love someone we do something about it, even if it means telling the head to change course.
I once said to Sam, “If we break up, let’s break up because of some inherent difference. Some irreconcilable conflict that neither of us can get over. We can’t break up because of geography, because of distance. Distance is fixable.”
We had found our inherent difference. Our irreconcilable conflict. And if part of that meant that I was a Heart: that I had the chance to fall in love, to let myself be vulnerable and raw enough to, that I cried at every airport and bus station and left letters in books at the end of our trips, and that my thinking was often messy, painful and naive at times but a naiveté that was lined with hope, then I want to be a Heart.
I want to shed the weight of being a Head every single time. I want to be a Heart that has a Head if it’s dangerous but a light when it’s not. I want to be a Heart that beats in the woods. That is driven by love, not by fear or uncertainty. I want my heart to be strong because it has been given the chance to be hurt, not because it has been kept safely away. And I want to share my heart with someone so that the next time, when it does reach that clearing in the woods, it won’t be by itself.
Lily is an Oregonian living in Brooklyn. You can read more of her stories at lilybussel.tumblr.com
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