Track 15 Delilah
Delilah
“We should go for a hike,” Delilah announces when they finish their second round of dinner, a more substantial preparation of sandwiches with vegetables and cheese and avocado, with a bottle of fancy small-batch pressed fruit juice shared between them.
She doesn’t even put any vodka in hers. She thinks she should get an award for that, but she keeps the thought to herself.
Emmett puts their cup of juice down and looks pointedly up at the gathering twilight, where a few stars are visible against a deepening blanket of indigo. “The trails close at sunset,” they point out. “It says so on all the park signs.”
Delilah waves a hand. “We’ll be very careful,” she says. “Besides, I’m sure people accidentally lose track of time out there all the time. It’s not like we’re going to get arrested or something. And we have time—the campground gates don’t close till ten.”
Emmett doesn’t look convinced. Delilah leans forward, cupping a hand around her mouth like she’s whispering a secret. “I’ll play you the songs I’ve finished so far when we get back,” she says. “You won’t have to sneak-listen. I’ll even let you give me actual feedback.”
“It’s not like I’d know what to say,” they say, but they sigh, and Delilah knows she’s won. She grins, swinging a leg over the picnic table bench and getting to her feet.
“We’ll clean up and be ready in five?”
The entrance to the park is about half a mile from the campground.
There’s still enough light to see a clearly well-trodden footpath a few hundred yards before the official turnoff, and when Delilah spots it she grabs Emmett’s sleeve, tugging them over to it.
They spend fifteen minutes tramping through the woods before they emerge on what must be the other side of the visitor center.
The lights from the on-site lodge are visible through the trees, and that’s enough for Delilah to orient herself.
She pulls the trail map out of her backpack and studies it under her phone’s flashlight.
“Is it worth pointing out that I think this is a bad idea?” Emmett asks as she finds the trail marker she was looking for and sets off again, following the yellow dots leading away from the visitor center.
“You’re welcome to go back,” Delilah says, careful to keep her voice down. “I’m a big girl, I can go up by myself.”
“That would be worse, actually,” Emmett says. They grab her backpack to stop her from walking into a tree branch, give her a look that clearly says I told you so, and sigh, “How far is this trail supposed to go?”
Delilah grins. She loves winning. “Not even a mile one-way,” she says. “And it doesn’t branch off at all. Basically a straight line, to the extent that I ever do anything straight.” She pauses. “It’s practically all stairs, though. Sorry. Hope your shoes are comfy.”
Emmett mutters something that might be God help me, but falls into step beside her without further argument.
It’s chillier than it was earlier in the day, though probably still unseasonably warm for October.
Delilah’s grateful for her jacket, but the walk is invigorating enough to keep her from getting too cold.
Emmett, she notices, seems to be rubbing at their arms again, occasionally even their sides, but they turn her down when she offers the cardigan she has on under her jacket, firmly enough that she doesn’t ask a second time.
The forest is alive around them. If she hadn’t been walking, Delilah would have closed her eyes just to breathe in the hundred thousand tiny noises of animals and birds and bugs and water and wind, filling herself up with every sign of life for a thousand miles.
They make good time up to the Lover’s Leap overlook.
The path is practically all stairs, as much as Delilah has been privately hoping that was false advertising from the trail map, but stairs have the advantage of making it almost impossible for them to get lost. Still, they take more effort than she really planned for, and they’re both breathless by the time they climb the last few steps and emerge onto the platform and make their way over to the railing.
“All right,” Emmett admits after a few moments. “You were right. This is beautiful.”
The view from the overlook stretches out across the Illinois River, inky dark under the night sky.
It’s a clear, cloudless night, and they’re far enough from Chicago and its light pollution that the stars stretch out into infinity, constellations glittering and gorgeous, the water below a rippling mirror, a reflection on a reflection.
Delilah sits down at the edge of the platform, up against the railing, and lets her legs dangle over the edge while she rests her arms on the crossbeam.
After a moment’s hesitation, Emmett comes to sit beside her, scooting close, and Delilah lets herself imagine that it’s for something more than warmth.
Growing up in a city, Delilah never spent much time out in nature.
It was always a quaint idea, going camping, hiking, surrounding herself with grass and trees instead of people and cars and noise.
The first time she ever slept outdoors in the woods, on a camping trip with a few high school friends, she’d spent hours staring up at the ceiling of the tent, listening for anything that resembled human sound, until she managed to hear the music of the world around her, haunting and lovely.
She’d closed her eyes and tried to find patterns in the sounds, but every time she thought she could, an owl would call out, or a burst of wind would send the leaves above the tent into a rattling, whistling dance, or a distant frog would croak a lover’s yearning into the night.
It took her too long to realize that the addictive frustration of trying to find order in the chaos of the forest’s melodies was like trying to find silence in her own mind, which never, ever seemed to rest. Something always buzzed inside it, like the persistent attention of a bee at a picnic, tempted toward the sweetness of whatever it found spread out on the blanket but always so, so close to stinging.
In her head, there was always something, either wild and singing and fastfastfast spiraling or the deep, crushing weight of every way she’d ever wanted to hurt, every word that ever made her feel even a moment’s doubt, every scab she could possibly find to pick at.
The whirlwind of euphoria and then the inevitable crash, the sweet spot of humming hypomania that always made her feel like maybe, maybe, if she could just keep it going, she could—she could—
Delilah closes her eyes. Takes a breath, and then another.
Feels the weight of her phone in her pocket like a physical reminder of everything she’s supposed to be doing, producing, responding to: messages from Alex, from Iris, from her mom; emails from her publicist and the sound mixer and the producers and the label.
Alex is fielding all of them, at least for now, but the notifications still taunt her like a child on a playground holding her favorite toy just out of reach.
The half-written songs in her notebook, scribbled-out lines and notations rather than anything even remotely usable, mock her with just how not good enough they are. How not good enough she is.
She wants, fervently, to throw her phone over the edge of the platform. She wants to go home and crawl into her mom’s bed and not talk to anyone for a week. She wants to drive off into the sunset and never be perceived by another person ever again. She wants a cigarette.
“Delilah,” Emmett says quietly.
Delilah blinks. Realizes she’s been squeezing her hands together so tightly her knuckles have turned white enough to be visible in the darkness. She swallows. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” A moment, a breath, and then, “Can I touch you?”
Delilah huffs. “Sure,” she says. “Why not.”
One of Emmett’s hands slips between both of hers, gently but firmly pulling them apart and lacing their fingers with hers. They squeeze once, then say, “Are you here?”
“Where else would I be?”
“You tell me.”
Delilah looks out at the river, at the slowly shifting reflections of the stars.
She thinks of a hundred thousand things to say, some of them true, some of them nowhere close, and settles on the simplest, most honest words she can find in the mess of her head.
“I almost killed myself at a place like this once.”
She waits for the gasp, for the concern, for the pity. None of it comes. “Okay,” Emmett says. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
Delilah glances at them. “That’s it?”
Emmett inclines their head. Their pale skin almost seems to glow. “I could ask questions,” they say. “Or say more, if you want me to. But I don’t have to. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
She turns her gaze down to their linked hands.
It’s too dark to really see them, but the weight of Emmett’s fingers and palm against hers is comforting, solid.
If she concentrates, she can almost feel their pulses, beating strangely in sync.
“It was a long time ago—right before I got diagnosed.” Emmett makes a soft, questioning sound, and Delilah clears her throat.
“Bipolar II. Yay for putting a name to the problem, right?” She forces herself to go on before they can reply.
“I went on a spring break trip with Iris, and I’d been…
I thought I was just feeling happier. I had this great best friend, I had this community around me, everything was great, nothing hurt.
Sure, my brain was running a thousand miles a second and Iris had to take my credit card away because I couldn’t stop buying things for our room and I was mostly living on caffeine and weed and cigarettes, but everything was good. ”
“Until?”
She shrugs. “Until it wasn’t.”