Home: Scenic Pine, The Doe

I did not leave Northeastern Pennsylvania long enough ago to dread my return as much as I do. Running as far as I have, the sick summer grey of its reflection still haunts me in the rearview. 

Appalachian heat sits heavy on my shoulders – wet and stagnant. The very thought of this feeling used to shudder through me as I crushed the end of a Vogue under the toe of my day heel. I am not the woman I was six months ago. I was leather and red wine. I was tapestry. I was the distant sigh of a poor man’s trumpet, echoing through the cobblestone streets. And now I am thinner and worse. I am dirt-coated denim. I am the tin taste of well water. I am the dust of lorazepam, the unridding smell of weed on your coat and fingers. 

Each time I find my way back between the mountains of the Wyoming Valley, I am lying in wait. I am scrambling in preparation to leave. Scraping nickels together, I work a dead-end waitressing job next to women who once had dreams like mine, and I stare catatonic at the world’s most mediocre wedding venue as they blow cigarette smoke in my face in warning. They live and breathe my worst nightmare, in and out through the end of a Newport. 

In the valley, I am the restless teenage girl I once was. She creeps insatiable in the deepest brown of my eyes, forever discontented with each return. I see her, sometimes, staring at my drunk, tearstained reflection in the molded bathroom mirror of my childhood home. I feel her, her bones desperate to escape my body as I drive through those backroads again. Billows of brush reach for the cracked edges of the asphalt and I am her again. I am mean and sharp-tongued. I am quick-witted and desperate. 

Graveyards on graveyards, I pass by those who were bred to die here, those whose bodies will never know the earth outside of these hills. There is a beauty in it that strikes a minor chord inside of me. The green is wild, a sea that peaks and undulates between the wildflowers. It is soft and teeming in the evening light, peering through the treeline, sparkling golden on my cheeks. Deer lift their heads from the undergrowth at the rumble of a pickup truck’s engine. I take my eyes off the road again, and I can’t help but wish that I did not grow up here. Perhaps then I wouldn’t follow, “It’s beautiful,” with an apprehensive “but–” 

Ghosts of my childhood suffocate each potential viewpoint. The gravel is coated in shattered glass. Between the natural falls and hiking trails, there’s the parking lot where I lost my virginity; there's the railroad tracks where the stones pierced my knees; there’s my highschool, haunted by red brick and the loins that bore me. Taunted by the memories that lurk between the needles of each pine, I stir in the dissonance of familiarity. 

I found a man from years ago – one of those visions from my past. A strong, steady one whose striking eyes I’d met in passing for the most formative years of my life. His name slipped safely through my lips in whispers between tangled bedsheets. He kissed me on the breath of red wine for the first time after eight years of knowing me at my worst. There was a beating heart in his seaglass eyes, and I spent many nights holding my breath in a desperate attempt to sync it to my own. 

In the very beginning of May, the bitter chill of broken spring bit into my back. It was dark when I pulled in. The haze settled in from the mountains, and the porchlight cut through the fog. His stone silhouette stood beneath the yellow. Calloused hands pushed the glass open further, and he became one of those images that surfaces when I think of home. His arm outstretched, looking for the last bits of sun over the water, he became a statue in that Cathedral. Sometimes my chest tightens with guilt at the touch of his hand. He is a good man. And I am me. 

He’s the hazy blue that settles over the skyline as the sun sinks behind the mountains, the drumming rhythm of cicadas in the marsh. I am the bone outline of ribs on a tick-bitten fawn, the falling-in-reverse feeling of an overdose in dew-soaked denim.  

He grew up on the other side of Carverton, where chain link fences are an eyesore and “summer” is used as a verb, in the land of untouched wine cellars and marble countertops. I grew up across that highway, following the limp of roadkill into sun bleached church letter boards. Plywood yard signs read hand painted yellow, “Jesus Saves from Hell!” The smell of wood rot made its way into my childhood bedroom and followed me well into adulthood. I grew up among asbestos – in the land of leashless dogs and linoleum. 

I sit beside him and stare in wonder as he recalls a life so different from mine. He pushes his s’s to the front of his teeth and speaks of the Valley with an animated charm. It is somewhere to run to rather than from. That is an ideal more foreign to me than the streets of France or Italy. 

I spent half a year across Europe searching for the same kind of comfort he finds at home. I’ve always had a flair for the foreign, I suppose. Somehow, I find solace in the dissonance of culture shock. European streets cannot echo reminders of American asphalt. European women are long and lean. With dark, sunny eyes and bridged noses, they are all that I want to be. European men look at me like an artifact. A stolen painting, a Venus in their national museum. Men in the Valley look at me like the white-tail doe, staring hopeless down the barrel of a gun. 

Both of them light my smoke with careful, steady hands. Still, looking into piercing eyes glowing orange before the flame becomes too much to bear. I stare aimless into the view instead. Yellow streetlamps painting soft shadows over cobblestones and twisted gargoyle faces, the fireflies floating from the overgrowth on Lake Louise. In either place, “I do not belong here,” slips thoughtlessly off my tongue. 

As soon as the Umbrian mountains of central Italy begin to settle into my skin, I’m standing at the viewpoint and the ebb and flow of green ahead of me pangs in my chest like the church bell. And I’m home again, at the lookout on Dug road, watching the telephone wire stretch further than the people here will ever dare to go.

About the Author

Ainsley Eidam is a fiction writer from Dallas, Pennsylvania. She's a third-year student at Arcadia University, studying Creative Writing with a minor in French. Ainsley is a storyteller by nature, derived from her family's deep appreciation for language and the arts.