I Keep Ending Up in Tunnels

 I was nine the first time I remember this happening. My parents were getting divorced. They thought they were good at hiding their arguments from me.  I’d just been watching them through the kitchen window while they screamed at each other on the back deck.  My mom said some stuff I didn’t know about my dad, and my dad called her a bitch.  This was what made me decide to go for a walk in the woods.  It was just a slim buffer of pine trees between our apartment complex and the highway, but it was the only place I really had to stew in private.

I was going really fast with my head down.  I wanted to keep walking until I wore through my shoes and collapsed with bloody feet on the sidewalk in whatever town I’d managed to make it to.  I fantasized about my panicked parents showing up at the hospital and all the doctors and nurses giving them judgmental looks.  I almost tripped over a pair of antlers on the ground because I wasn’t really paying attention.  

I ran through the fantasy enough times that it started to get boring.  That’s when I paused and realized I’d been walking in the woods for forty-five minutes.  I should’ve exited out onto the sidewalk by the highway after five.  I looked around and noticed how dark it was, the kind of dense-canopy darkness that doesn’t happen in pine forests.   

At that age, I didn’t try to reason things away; I just freaked the hell out.  So I just started crying and ran back the way I came.  It was getting darker.  It almost seemed like the trees were closing in on me.  I ran until I was out of breath, and then I walked as quickly as I could while breathing hard.  I glanced up and couldn’t see the sky.  I didn’t hear a single bird or bug.  Ahead of me, all the trees seemed to curve around a tiny black gap way up in the distance.

I stopped a few times out of fear, hoping my parents would just come and find me.  But after a few minutes, I’d work up the courage to get up and start walking again.  The black gap up ahead got bigger as I got closer, and it gradually became so dark that I could barely see anything in front of me.  

I walked on until I noticed I could see more in front of me now.  It was getting lighter.  I started running again, and it kept getting lighter.  Finally, I broke through the tree line.  It was still mid-afternoon and partly cloudy.  I looked over and saw people playing tennis.  Our complex didn’t have tennis courts. Somehow, I was at the YMCA down the road from us.  This didn’t make any sense, but at the time I just remember feeling upset that I was going to have to walk another twenty minutes after that whole ordeal.

I trudged back to our apartment, where I found my parents still fighting in the living room.  They hadn’t even noticed I was gone.  They paused the fight to lecture me about leaving without telling them.  I wanted to throw my backpack at them, but instead I said the most awful thing I could think of on short notice.

“I just went down on Sam Honnover because you’re getting divorced.”  I didn’t know what going down was.  I’d just heard my cousins talk about it and knew it was really bad.  

My parents watched me walk to my room in stunned silence.

It didn’t happen again until I was twenty. I’d dropped out of college six months earlier and I wasn’t speaking to my parents.  I was living in a house with seven other people and waiting tables at a Shoney’s.  I would’ve been pretty miserable if I weren’t so high on spite and determined to prove my point.  Looking back, I’m not sure what point I was trying to prove or to whom.  

I was riding the bus back home from a double-shift.  The customers had been extra shitty that day, and I just wanted to go home and smoke with one of my less-annoying roommates.  I was pulling my book out of my bag when it slipped out of my hand and slid under the seat in front of me.  I literally stomped my foot in anger.  I tried to reach under the seat with my foot and kick it back out, but I couldn’t feel it.  Finally, I got down on my hands and knees to grab it.  Someone had drawn a really bad picture of a deer or something in Sharpie on the back of the seat.  

I couldn’t see the book.  The seats were high enough that I could fit my head and shoulders under, so I shoved myself in.  I still couldn’t see it. There was enough room to move, so I kept inching forward on my belly until my entire body was under the seat.  This shouldn’t have been possible, but I was just hell-bent on finding the damn book.  I kept inching until I had rug burn on my stomach.  Then I realized how dark it was.  

I immediately thought of the woods, but I didn’t want to believe it was happening again.  I’d convinced myself that I’d misremembered the episode from when I was nine.  I was just a kid, after all.  

There wasn’t enough room to turn around, so I had to keep moving forward.  After five minutes, my stomach was really raw.  Thank God I’m not claustrophobic.  

It started to get darker, and I finally started believing my childhood memory.  Still, I kept inching forward.  

It was an agonizing hour before I saw light again.  My head bumped a pair of legs.  I heard a man shriek, and then the legs were standing.  I climbed out from under the seat and found myself surrounded by people glaring at me like I was a pervert.  I wasn’t even sure how to explain myself, so I just yanked the stop cord and hurried off the bus.

I found myself in a part of town I didn’t recognize.  It definitely wasn’t on my bus route.  I’d left my messenger bag with my phone and wallet on the original bus, so I had to walk two hours to get home.  When I got there, I got really high and slept for sixteen hours.

Luckily, someone turned in my bag to the transit lost-and-found.  Nobody turned in my book.  I was taking a ferry ride six months later, and I found it under the seat in front of me.  It had my name inside the front cover and everything.  

I got paranoid after that.  I kept thinking it was happening again for the next couple years.  A hallway would be a little longer or darker than I thought it should, and I'd start to panic. It always turned out to be false alarms.  Gradually, I let myself relax.  By the time I turned 29, I’d almost forgotten about the bus incident.

There was a lot to celebrate at my 29th birthday.  I’d been clean and sober for four years.  I’d just recently finished a trade school program in welding and had a decent job lined up.  I had a steady boyfriend.  

We’d been dating for almost two years, and he was great.  He had a good job.  My parents liked him.  He remembered birthdays and anniversaries.  He wasn’t abusive or mean.  I was the mean one.  I’d make a really funny/cutting remark about a coworker, and he’d just raise his eyebrows and say “Oh, wow.”  Meanwhile, if I vented about something dumb I’d done at work that I felt sensitive about,  he’d laugh and tell me not to take myself so seriously.  He never seemed to have petty thoughts about his coworkers or make mistakes at work.  Naturally, I hated him after two years.  

I didn’t want to break up.  We lived together, so I couldn’t just let things peter out on their own.  We would have to have a discussion – probably more than one.  Moving out would be a headache.  My friends and family would have a lot of questions that I wouldn’t have good answers for.  So I smiled and told everyone how lucky I was at the surprise party he threw me for my 29th.  

After all our friends left, he threw his arms out for a hug and said “Did I do good?”  I’d made up all sorts of excuses not to touch him for the last few weeks, but I couldn’t really get out of it this time.  So I let him take me in his arms and pretended not to look at his "fun" sweater with the cartoon deer on it.  I started to say “Thank you”, but then he kissed me.  

He was a terrible kisser.  He had an off-puttingly large mouth, and he always opened it up too wide.  It felt like he was trying to swallow my nose.  But I closed my eyes and let him keep going because he’d gone to all this trouble to throw me a surprise party, even though I hate surprises.  

Because his normal technique was so sloppy and I’d already half-disassociated, I didn’t notice his top lip skimming over my eyes until it was too late.  Suddenly, my entire face was engulfed in squelchy gross heat.  Then my entire head.  By the time I realized it was happening again, I was fully inside a wet pink cavern.  I screamed and kicked at what I think was a cheek, and then I hunched my shoulders and began the trek.  

The first time had lasted a couple hours, and the second time had lasted close to six.  Neither of them could’ve prepared me for this one.  I hiked through an endless mouth for over eight days.  I refused to drink any of his saliva on principle.  I can’t describe the warring discomforts of dehydration inside and sticky sweat outside.  It was hell.  I considered lying down and dying more than a few times.  

I’m sure you’re wondering if I emerged out of a gross place on day eight. I actually don’t know how I got out.  I remember getting really tired and thinking it was about time to lie down and rest, and then my next memory is waking up on the sofa in our apartment with my boyfriend shouting at me about where the hell I’d been for the last week.  

Instead of answering him, I told him I’d leave him a check for the next month’s rent, and he could keep my half of the deposit when he moved out.  I’d come by and pick up my things tomorrow while he was at work.  His face was still mostly righteous outrage, but the first hints of confusion and fear were creeping in from the corners of the eyes.  

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

I was feeling a little nostalgic, so I whipped out an old classic.

“I just went down on Sam Honnover because you’re a bad kisser.”