All These Things I Have Kept

A droplet of water, clear and complete, blossomed on the glass. Merging with another and then another until, burdened by its own weight, the bubble gave way to a rivulet that bled down the windshield and into the gulley of black plastic.

Thomas followed the raindrops with his eyes, tracing their courses as they vacillated nervously before the chop of the wiper blade that swept across the windshield like a metronome. Thump, thump, thump.

The red of the stop light surrendered to a green that seeped through the mist and ushered him on.

A flash caught Thomas’s attention as he passed through Jordan Park, along a stretch of road hemmed on both sides by dense foliage. Thick bands of leafy branches wove tightly to form sheer, lush walls. Something metallic lay nestled just as the road turned, in the verge that mediated between the tree line and the asphalt. Thomas pulled his battered Nissan into the shallow ditch beyond the bend and clambered out, zipping his coat against the rain.

What possessed him to stop, he couldn’t say. Thomas had driven this road a thousand times on his way downtown. A change? A break in the routine? Not that. Breaks were part of the routine: a shiny new job, a sabbatical, going back to school, getting away from the city. The constant change of change only adding to the weary carousel – steadily spiraling – its bold, bright horses heading for nowhere. But in that moment, something that had been gnawing at his brain suddenly stopped and was replaced by a tantalizing prospect. The prospect of discovery, of adventure. The prospect that, by leaving the road – in that meek and trivial departure – he might start to be lifted out of his mental exile; bound as he was by the soft shackles of career goals, picture-perfect vacations and health spending accounts. 

Thomas reached into the car, retrieving his laptop bag – a precaution made necessary by a broken door lock – and squelched back up the road toward the curve. Though the deep mud sucked at his shoes and his rain-sodden pants grew heavier with each stride, there was a lightness in his step. He felt himself becoming more defined, more finite, as the endless cycle of his existence was intersected by this single, peculiar, defiant act.

Thomas saw the flash of metal again, just a few feet away this time. A little disappointed, he saw that it was only a bunch of keys. But, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed files strewn, and beyond them, a phone, and a wallet stacked with a deck of matte plastic. As he moved toward the discarded items, Thomas was surprised to see an opening cut into the vegetation rising in an arch above the phone’s rain-speckled screen. A clean tunnel, as if carved out of solid granite, stretched away ahead of him, low and narrow, until it concluded in a perfect point of dazzling light.

It was impossible to tell if it was near or a thousand miles away; the regularity of the tunnel belied estimation. Thomas was mesmerized. Ignoring the strands of doubt that grasped at him, whispering of the warm comfort and safety of his car, of his family, of his life, he pressed on into the tunnel. Stumbling along at first, Thomas caught his clothes and the exposed skin of his hands on dark thorns embedded in the tunnel walls. Streaks of blood shone red through tears in his sleeves, but he had momentum now. Driven on by a burgeoning sense of peace, and more than a little curiosity, Thomas broke into a run. Without fully realizing, he dropped the keys held loosely in his hand, then his bag, then his phone; he couldn’t even look back, straining every nerve and tendon with an intense desire to reach the tunnel’s end.

Then, quite suddenly, in a moment or a century he exploded from the tunnel into glorious golden sunlight. When Thomas’s eyes had adjusted to the light, he stood atop a rocky outcrop and at his feet a broad valley of vivid colour unfolded to the horizon. Spellbinding coppers and rich bottle-greens girded the swelling hills that ran beside the rushing waters of the river which formed and gave life to them. Thomas knew that he too would find life here in this valley, a restoration, and even the thought was a salve to his tired soul. He gasped lungfuls of delicious fresh air and drank deep the mysterious possibility of an end to his aimlessness and a beginning of meaning. 

Feeling the tug of a light breeze on his fingers, Thomas looked down at his bloodied hands and found, clutched among the cuts, a picture of his eldest daughter Zoe. She was only two years old then, and cute, staring sulkily at the camera in her best clothes, unruly hair barely tamed. All at once, Thomas was hit by a wave of all the things the photo represented. The summer evening walks, rangy and free with laughter. The feeling of pure power to hold a fragile life in his hands. The bedtime stories, nuzzled close and warm. The crippling cold-sweat of anxiety when she was sick. The unbridled optimism of a future to be realized. The sharp acidic sting of the need to control. He longed to give her the world; but he also longed to be that world. Neatly disguised in his love for her was his love of self.

He felt the urge to drop the picture and replace the image with reality. Why couldn’t he let it go? He felt an impulse to, though that feeling he understood even less. Why would he drop his picture? Come to think of it, why would he drop his phone or his keys? All these things were his. She was his.

Thomas turned around and looked back down the tunnel. The bend in the road was much closer than he remembered. Just a few dozen steps. He began to walk – hesitantly at first and then briskly, remembering he was late for a meeting and that he had left his laptop on the ground. He reached the verge in seconds to find his things scattered in much the same way as he had found those of the last traveller, tossed and disturbed as if the tunnel had spat them out.

Stooping, Thomas collected his phone, bag and keys one by one from the grass and cursed the mud-stains on them. The rain pooled once more in the crevices of his footprints. Promising himself that he would never again give in to what his friends would no doubt see as merely the weakness of spontaneity, he renounced the tunnel and trooped back to his car.

In another week, turning that same tree-lined corner of Jordan Park, Thomas caught sight of his photo of Zoe where he left it on the dash. Mildly curious, he glanced up at the spot where he had entered the tunnel. The morning sun bleached the forest with its white glare, but there was no tunnel to be seen. It was gone. The rippling, leafy surface had sealed so completely that nothing was left to suggest it had ever been there.

Thomas drove on.

For a short while after he was very sad, a deep heartsickness that he could not fathom rested on him. 

And then he forgot.

“And everyone that has forsaken houses, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.”

Matthew 19:29

Text: David Cade
Photography: Kyle Simpson