Be Brave, Be Strong

by Jill Homer

  It was April 14, and Geoff and I planned to leave Juneau in one week. Just one more week, and we would board a ferry that would return the two of us, my car, and our two bikes to the North American road system, where we would be free to wander as far south as we desired. We tentatively planned a road trip down the coast to San Francisco, where Geoff would race and I would sightsee, before heading east to my home state, Utah, to take up residence in a single-room cabin in the high desert near Capitol Reef National Park. There, we planned to live simply, train extensively, and enjoy a lifestyle in which little existed beyond the two of us and our passions.

  But it wasn’t Alaska. Although he accepted my boss’s ultimatum to take a couple months off and then come back to Juneau, Geoff admitted he still wasn’t certain he wanted to return. The damp isolation had a way of closing in, dropping curtains of gray over everything from our jobs to our relationship. I told him I wanted to give the prospect of staying in Juneau the summer to settle — we didn’t have to make any decisions right away. I suspected Juneau had pulled in Geoff more than he realized, and after a summer away, he would ache for the North in the same way I knew I would. He would remember that there was more to Alaska than latitude, lore, and lack of services. He would realize that the strength we both found in our three and a half years as Alaskans didn’t come from within — it came from everywhere around us. He would feel the love that I had found. It wasn’t the extremes I loved about the land, but the constants. The brightest moments always came after the darkest storms, and because I knew this, I could fully embrace both.

  It was Geoff’s thirty-third birthday. He asked me to accompany him to the local ski area to take photographs of him running in the snow, which he planned to send to the shoe company Montrail, a new major sponsor with whom he had just signed. Geoff’s and my forays into ultra-running and endurance biking both coincided with our move to Alaska. But while my biking endeavors became increasingly more abstract, Geoff became more successful as a runner. He dabbled in mountain biking — culminating in his scratch in the 2008 Great Divide Race — but he was seemingly unstoppable on his feet. He had yet to lose a hundred-mile race, and held course records on a number of shorter distance runs as well.

  In fact, the only thing he had ever failed at as a runner was the Iditarod Trail Invitational, but since no one paid attention to a race like that, Geoff was starting to gain recognition and corporate sponsors were taking notice. Geoff had several races lined up during the summer, and I was sure he was about to have his big breakthrough. I looked forward to being a part of that, because it felt important in a way my races never could. Geoff’s races were about winning, not surviving, and there was something more meaningful about ending an adventure not only standing, but standing on top. I knew I would never be the person at the top. But I didn’t mind the role of the smiling, supportive girlfriend in the background.

  “Light’s really flat today,” I said as we made our way up the slope. “Lucky you wore the orange shoes — that’s going to be about the only thing that shows up in all this gray.”

  “Yeah, I just need a few shots of the shoes,” Geoff said.

  I set down my bike and scanned the overcast sky for the tiniest break in the clouds. Nothing. Gray sky, gray snow. I bent down and loosened my shoelaces. I wasn’t used to wearing shoes on both feet. I had only started putting a shoe on my right foot a few days earlier. The hard leather pinched my still-tender toes, which remained ultra-sensitive to pressure and cold in the aftermath of frostbite. I wore a sock, sandal and bootie on my foot for six weeks following my dip in Flathorn Lake. After about four weeks, I started using that setup to tentatively pedal my bicycle down the road. My legs were weak, my muscles shrunken and my toes were sore, but it felt good just to turn the cranks once again. Geoff’s birthday was my first time out with my snow bike since the Iditarod. I knelt atop a thin layer of ice crust that was swiftly disintegrating beneath spring’s warmth. Everything about the simple act of being outside, with a bicycle, wearing shoes, felt both novel and familiar at the same time.

  “Okay, now run toward me,” I called out to Geoff, who had jogged a few hundred feet up the hill.

  He loped down the hill and I fired off the camera, steadying my hands as much as possible to coax the point-and-shoot to recognize motion in the low light. Geoff turned around and made a few more passes before announcing, “That’s good.”

  “I’m not sure if any of these are very crisp,” I said. “It’s hard to tell.”

  “As long as the shoes are in focus, they should be good,” Geoff said. “I need to get going if I’m going to fit in a run before work. Do you want me to take you home?”

  “No,” I said. “I feel like taking my bike up the hill. I’ll just ride home.”

  Geoff nodded and continued down the hill at a near sprint. I climbed on my bike and cranked hard up the slope. The ice crust crackled beneath my wheels. Beyond the mountain ridge, the slate sky was beginning to break apart; strips of sunlight glowed through the cracks. Sweat streamed from beneath my helmet, but my bare fingers felt icy. The air bit like winter but smelled sweet like spring — a perfect limbo between the two seasons.

  As I neared the top of the mountain, the clouds continued disintegrating until the sky was a patchwork of deep blue and billowing white. The air was warm and I left my gloves off as I turned to begin my well-earned descent. All around me, the lingering veneer of winter was bathed in golden light. I released the brakes and launched the bike down the ski hill, swerving wildly at first. I pushed my butt behind the saddle and leaned into the handlebars until the front wheel straightened. Chunks of icy snow hit me from behind as momentum carried the bike away. I laughed out loud because I hadn’t felt anything like it in months — just me, my bike, and the guiltless ease of gravity. I tore down the mountain, holding back nothing, taking in great gulps of oxygen as spruce trees and steel lift towers streamed past. Exhilaration pumped through my heart and emerged as love — the warm sentiment for the past, the beauty of the present, and the promise of the future. I was riding my bike again. I was going home to celebrate Geoff’s birthday. I was heading south to pursue my dreams. I had the promise of job security waiting for me in this beautiful place. It seemed like there was nothing that could stop me, nothing.

  Six days passed. It was April 20, two days before we were set to leave on the ferry. Tiny green buds were emerging from alder branches and my hours at work were piling up like the last rotten leaves of fall. My boss wasn’t about to let me leave town with a single piece of paper left in the inbox, so I logged twelve- and fourteen-hour days even as my trip to-do list grew longer and more neglected. My car was still filled with boxes that needed to go to the storage unit, boxes that needed to go friends’ houses and boxes that needed to go to the dump. I could no longer remember which was which. As the hours closed in I had no time to ride my bike, but I tried not to stress about it. I still had nearly two months before the race. The time to train would come.

  Geoff had managed to clear out most of our room when I returned home late on a cool Monday night. The bed was one of the last pieces of furniture remaining, scheduled to go out the next day with a stranger who responded to an online ad. Geoff’s gear lay alone in neat piles next to the bed — a small duffle of clothing, a thin sleeping bag, and a large duffle full of running shoes. On my side of the room, belongings were still strewn everywhere — fleece jackets and chamois-padded tights, brand new bicycle tires and books that had yet to find a home. Geoff lay in bed with a single lamp shining on the pages of the magazine he was reading. I took off my shoes and pants and crawled between the crisp sheets still wearing my work shirt.

  “How was work?” he asked.

  “Ugh,” I said. “My boss has taken the rest of the week off, for one last vacation before he has to do my job for three months. He has me fielding all of the calls from crazies, wrangling the reporters, trying to type a one-page job description of everything I do at the Empire. Two more days of this. I’m not sure I
can make it.”

  Geoff nodded but continued reading. “How was your day?” I asked.

  “Good,” he said. He had wrapped up his last day of work the day before. “I did a lot of packing. I went for a run.”

  “I can’t wait to get out for a bike ride,” I said. “I think I might be able to cram a few hours in when we stop over in Whitehorse.”

  Geoff set his magazine on the floor. He reached for the light. “Are you going to bed now?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”

  The room went dark and I settled into the sheets. There was a strange chill to the air. I let my body shiver gently and took deep breaths, drifting into the wavering limbo between alertness and oblivion. Several minutes passed while I floated through that gray space before Geoff spoke up again.

  “You still awake?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled.

  Geoff hesitated as he took several deep breaths, each time nearly releasing words that couldn’t quite leak out. I waited. “There’s something I should tell you before we take off Wednesday,” he said quickly.

  A streak of cold pierced my heart like a thin needle. There was fear in his voice, and the simple words themselves signaled danger.

  “What is it?” I asked quietly.

  Nearly a minute passed in more silence. Geoff breathed deeply. Every second, every labored breath, fueled a rising chorus of fear. The delay was unbearable. A thick, gurgling anger rose up from my gut. I wanted to roll over and grab his shoulders, shake him and scream at him to spit it out. I wasn’t sure I even cared what he said. He could tell me he had frequent thoughts about murdering me in my sleep, and that admission would not have been worse than his gulping silence. Geoff and I had been together more than eight years, and he had never made any confession to me. Nor did I ever suspect he should have one to make. What awaited me was a confession, and I knew from the coldness in the air that it was not going to be a happy one.

  “It’s just — that,” he finally said slowly. “It’s just that I’m not sure I can do this anymore.”

  The words born of sharp ice hit me like dead wood, blunt and meaningless but powerful in their unfocused pain. “What the hell are you talking about?” I said, doing nothing to mask my anger. “Do what anymore?”

  More gulping silence. At the second when I was reeling with thoughts about strangling the words out of him, he said, “This — oh, this is really hard for me to say. You and I. This. I don’t think this is what I want anymore.”

  The wood block of words hit me directly between the eyes. My mind flailed at them like a paper shredder, ambitious but fully inadequate to digest the whole weight of their meaning. In our eight years together, for all the times it had passed through both of our minds, Geoff and I had never talked openly about splitting up. It had come to the point where I didn’t even consider the end of the relationship to be a real possibility. Sure, we never married, but that was just a formality, more of a sign of our apathy to tradition and dedication to our own independence than a lack of commitment. Geoff and I had been partners since long before I considered a bicycle as anything more than a lousy form of cheap transportation. We had crossed the continent several times, both under our own power on those lousy forms of transportation, and in the very same half-rusted red Geo Prism that sat in our driveway, waiting to board a ferry in forty-eight hours. We exhausted our youth together. We camped and backpacked together. We climbed mountains together. We learned to ride bicycles long distances together. We made the giant leap to Alaska together. We discovered the world together.

  “So is that what you’re saying?” I said loudly, with no regard for our roommate in the next room. “Are you telling me you want to break up?”

  Geoff answered with more impenetrable, unbearable silence.

  “I think you need to tell me what exactly you want,” I yelled.

  “I’m — I’m not sure what I want,” Geoff said. “I’m scared.”

  “Why?” I gasped, groping for coherent thoughts to piece together as my mind stampeded through a near-decade worth of seemingly happy history. “Why are you telling me this? Now? Geoff, we’re supposed to be on a ferry in two days!”

  “That’s why I needed to tell you now,” Geoff stammered. “I need to make sure you still want to go.”

  “What do you mean, still go? Still go south? Still go to Teasdale?”

  “Yeah,” Geoff said hesitantly.

  “Why?” I gulped, now fighting back hot tears. “Why would I still want to go if you’re breaking up with me? That doesn’t make any sense. Either you want to be with me, or you don’t.”

  “I don’t know what I want,” Geoff squeaked.

  “Oh, that’s so pathetic,” I yelled. I scoured my flood of thoughts for something with more substance, something to relate both my disbelief at his words and hope that our plans and lives could somehow remain the same, but found nothing beyond brute anger. I leapt out of bed and stormed toward the bathroom.

  “Come back,” Geoff said quietly. “Please come back.”

  “I’ll be back,” I said. “I can’t be in here right now.”

  I slid down the backside of the bathroom door and crumpled on the cold tile floor, my head spinning through an unbearable reel of sunshine-soaked memories like children’s cartoons in a torture chamber. Geoff and I were grilling cheese sandwiches atop a red-checkered tablecloth on a June afternoon in Maine. Geoff was imitating E.T. saying “phone home” as we paddled down the Dirty Devil River in his canoe. Geoff was stroking my hair in the empty kitchen of our brand-new cabin in Homer. Geoff was running triumphantly toward me as he shattered the course record at the HURT 100 ultramarthon in Hawaii. The memories pounded hot blood through my throbbing skull. Why? Why would Geoff want to throw all of it away?

  I spent several minutes releasing the happy memories through a muffled series of sobs, then charged back into the bedroom with renewed rage.

  “Why are you doing this? Why now? Is there someone else?” I asked with a steady voice.

  “Well,” he said, drawing out the syllable.

  “Just tell me,” I spat.

  “Lately, I’ve started to form a really strong connection, with, with Misty,” he stammered.

  I wracked my throbbing memories. I could barely recall who Misty was. But it slowly came to me. Geoff’s short-haired, twenty-one-year-old coworker. The chick he went to weird parties with and had bonfires with, yeah, that was her, along with her hippy friends, who I could never hang out with because I was always working nights. Misty was cute but she was young — what else? I couldn’t even picture it. On the surface, she seemed to have little in common with a thirty-three-year-old cook and distance runner. I wanted to say, “You’ve got to be joking,” but the words hung on trembling lips. For eight years I had built up Geoff in my mind as someone who valued substance above all else, and the words he was saying to me sounded superficial, and strange.

  “It’s just that she and I have been hanging out a lot lately, and we’ve formed a really strong connection. It really just started to hit us this past week, how we felt about each other. I mean, I know she’s young. It’s not that I even think it can work between us. It’s just that being with her has helped me see that there’s something ... missing, in what you and I have.”

  I looked at him mutinously, an expression he could not see in the dark room. Over our basement-level bed, the lights of the parking lot flickered between the railings of a fence, like shadows in a prison cell. I studied the dim reflection and realized that I would remember that image, forever, and everything about that memory would be wrapped in hate.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” I asked. “We’ve been together eight years. The honeymoon doesn’t last forever, you know.”

  “I know,” he said. “But there should be something stronger there, something deeper. I’m not sure we have that anymore. Maybe we could, but I don’t know.”

  “What are you saying? Do you want to keep trying or not?”r />
  “I mean, I still think we should go on this trip, go to the cabin,” Geoff said. “Maybe we’ll find it. I don’t know.”

  “What about Misty?”

  “It’s not about her,” Geoff said. “She’s just someone that helped me to better see who I am.”

  I looked into his eyes; they reflected a sort of hollow exhaustion. I wanted to tell Geoff that I didn’t know who he was. I wanted to scream that I couldn’t be sure even he really knew who he was. But before the words could leave my lips, I realized with a calming tremor that his explanation did have rings of truth. Geoff and I lived in the same house in Juneau, but we went to our separate jobs and did our separate runs and bike rides and hung out with our different friends and co-workers. For so long, too long, we had floated on memories and routine. There was little else to salvage. Geoff and I hadn’t been close in a long time. But people don’t just give up eight years like that, not like that, with hollow words in rooms lit like prison cells. I tried to form the words to tell him that people don’t just throw away a decade of investment in a relationship on fleeting whims. But I was again silenced by cold realization — people do that all the time.

  “So,” Geoff’s voice cracked. “Will you still go to Utah with me?”

  My mind resumed racing. I wanted to get Geoff on the ferry with me so I could kick him out of my car in the middle of northern British Columbia. I wanted to turn on the lights and stare into his eyes so he could see all the happy memories that raced through my mind, exactly the way I saw them. I couldn’t believe the words he was saying, and yet I couldn’t discern how to read between the lines. If he wanted to get with some twenty-one-year-old woman, why not just get on with it? Stringing me along was so much worse than a clean break, and I would be a fool to allow it.