Adam wouldn’t buy the fishing rod until the next week’s trip into town, so he had no fishing to supplement his reading, writing, and walks. Instead, he dunked himself in the lake every morning, fully submerging himself for a second before bursting up from the surface and grabbing at his arms, hugging himself and feeling the instantaneous goosebumps arrive as his legs went numb and his breaths turned shallow. This was supposed to be good for you. He’d feel euphoric in a matter of minutes, a feeling probably attributable to the release of certain endorphins and neurotransmitters but which he felt could be placed equally at the foot of the fact that he’d done something hard and painful, had pushed himself to an edge, and survived.
He continued to use the telescope, too, day and night, making little diagrams of what it showed, just to practice making diagrams, to train himself to notice the details both on their own and also in relation to each other.
In the daytime, the telescope served up the forest, sky, and mountain across the lake. Sometimes, he could see small biplanes in the distance and with the telescope see the people inside, as if they were an arm’s reach away. He watched the hiking trails on the other mountains, too. There was a particularly popular one right across that he followed for much of its route, where he tracked upside-down people climb with their feet above their heads. Some jogged up. Some walked. Many he only saw once, and he crafted questions for them, imagined lives. But on the third day of this new activity he noticed a woman from the day before return and start at first, again, with a quick walk, then a jog, then back to a walk. She wore her hair in a ponytail, and she wore different colors of the same outfit, light tank top and dark shorts. She bobbed rhythmically when she jogged, with her ponytail accentuating the vertical motion.
She was the first face to appear to him twice, and the next morning she was there again, and he was there waiting, with his phone on this time to mark the time. 8:30. The next day: same time. Each day different colors of the same clothes, always the same ponytail. She drove a red crossover that she parked at the trailhead. He made out details of her upside down face, and quickly, though he did nothing, though he touched nothing, though he thought nothing, he felt shame, like he was peering through her bedroom window, even though all she was doing was running. He stood straight and watched the eyepiece. For a moment, he forgot she was actually out there and that he could see her moving without a telescope. He let his eyes drift from the eyepiece and out toward the mountain across, and he glimpsed her and averted his eyes again.
He went inside and read.
*
When he read, he constantly saw Rachel in his mind. So many names reminded him of her. All that was needed were the R, A, E, or L, and so many names had these 4 letters in one arrangement or another. When she came to mind lately, it was in two forms. One was brief glimpses. Snatches of times together. The other was a total scope, from when they met when he was twelve and she was eleven, to when he last saw her, three months before he moved to the cabin.
They’d met as preteens and begun dating when he was fifteen and she was fourteen. They’d broken up six months before he moved, when they were both 21. It hadn’t felt significant for him that they’d met when they were preteens, even though people commented on how sweet that was. It had felt like he’d known her his whole life, but he had felt this was more off a spiritual connection than off the actual time of the meeting. He was very confident that he’d have felt the same about having known her his whole life if he’d have met her at 27 or 87. Now, without her around, with no plans to ever see her again, he felt that he still knew her, that she still knew him, and that his love wouldn’t and couldn’t stay sequestered in his mind and body, no more than his breath could. It would slither and wind its way out of him, leak into the atmosphere and reach her, wherever she was, even if neither knew it.
She still made him want to believe in the metaphysical.