This evening I took the Girls down to Park Springs Park for an evening run. It had rained an hour or so earlier, so the trees were glossy and damp, dripping, glorious green and fragrant. When we arrived and I let the dogs out of the car, there was a deer standing in the meadow: an adult female, just standing, watching us with her enormous ears and giant eyes. Of course Roxy chased her into the woods. And I was yelling to Rox that there was no way she was going to catch that deer, my eye caught the silhouette of a young man sitting on a picnic table under the pavilion. He lifted a hand to me, I greeted him. We exchanged a few words about dogs and hunting... blah blah. I took the girls into the forest.
When we came out, half an hour later, the young man was sitting there still. I raised a hand to him again and he called out "How was your walk?" I told him it was fine, and asked if the deer had come back. He said she had, that she had come out of the forest and gone back in while we were gone. I stepped up to the pavilion and sat on the picnic table next to him and we talked.
His name is Justin. He's a beautiful, damaged, deranged young man. In his early twenties. Ginger-haired and blue eyed and tattooed. Beautiful. And quite mad. He talked to me about his adopted family that had "thrown him away" and his biological family who were Illuminati, and how he had an inheritance, and his siblings and cousins had been "switched out," (the meaning of which I never did glean). He told me he had a daughter, born June, 2012. He had never seen her. Only pictures. He said the Illuminati killed his first girlfriend with a baseball bat because she wanted to be with him.
He was so gentle and softspoken and destroyed. I wondered how he survived and where he lived. He told me I reminded him of his aunt (I can't remember if that was biological aunt or adoptive aunt), and told me we were related in some way, no matter what I told him about my faraway geneology.
He had a carp tattooed on his right bicep. The word "Pride" on his left tricep. A star on his chest. And that red, red hair. So beautiful.
I knew the young girl of me would have been hopelessly attracted to him: his lostness, his outsiderness, the wild smell of him and his wild story. The mother in me wanted to hold him in my arms and feed him a sandwich and give him clean sheets to sleep on until he was healed and safe from the world.
As a teenager I was always hopelessly drawn to the outsider: the long-haired drop-out, the circus performer,the aging hippie, the hood. It's all part of that need to care for the broken and unloved. This boy sparked that in me. I wanted to love him, in some way: to heal him, to offer him a safe haven, get him help, feed him a good meal and give him a safe place to come to get his madness medicated and under control. I wondered what part of his story was true and what part was pure delusion. Such a sweet, gentle, and broken boy.
Mothering the world, as usual. Bringing home strays. But I'll be watching for him around town now, looking after him in some small way. Sigh. like the spirit of Lucky inhabiting some lost boy's thin, tattooed body.
As we talked, the doe came back to the edge of the forest and watched us from halfway behind a tree in the shadows. I didn't see her at first, but Justin pointed her out to me. She stood and watched us for a long time, even with Kobi barking at her. Eventually she ghosted away.
No owl tonight, though I told Justin to listen for it: the barred owl that lives there and calls "Who? Who? Who Cooks for You?"
Wonder if he'll hear it tonight?
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