We got married six days ago, on the other coast, the one that doesn’t have rainforests like this one. We walk through fallen trunks shaggy with moss, Douglas firs and Sitka spruces so tall we have to crane our necks to see where they end and the sky begins, clubmoss and licorice ferns the color of key limes hanging from their bodies. The path is dotted with love poems on signs like they knew we were coming. We read them aloud to each other: Mary Oliver’s Sleeping in the Forest, Jaiden Dokken’s Before things got bad.
Before things got bad, in college, I taught my mother a trick that I thought made my face look skinnier in pictures: tilt your chin slightly down and look up. We tried it out together in the Christmas photos that year, both of our chins drawn into sharp focus over our holiday sweaters, but in our wedding pictures, I lift my head, gaze right at the photographer’s long lens.
The wedding was beautiful, we keep saying to each other as we wind deeper through the forest. Perfect, except for the empty seats where my parents would have been, had I been marrying a man.
As our boots crunch across the trail we see trees that seem to stand on their roots as stilts, hovering feet above the layer of ferns and shrubs that cover the soil. When a big tree falls, it provides a decaying home for hemlock and spruce seedlings to grow. A nurselog, the plasticky trail sign explains. The fallen tree rots away; the new tree stands over a large, gaping wound on knotty stilts, marked forever by what came before it.
The day after we get home, my sister sends a photo in the group chat of the family vacation she’s on with her husband and toddler, a visit to my parents’ house in Florida where I’m not very welcome, and in it I can see the trace of me where I’ve almost been erased: the tilt of my mother’s chin down, her eyes up at the camera, body angled just like I taught her, back when we thought we wanted the same things.
