January in Cook Forest Pennsylvania (Where Kyle Doesn’t Die) (NSFW)

"It isn't that high."

"It was just as high this afternoon. You said it was too high then."

"Yeah, well. Things are different."

"You mean you're drunk."

"This much is true."

I'm standing on a branch, the bark and snow forming a miserable surface and my childish boots are slipping. They come a bit up my shin, shit, three inches or so and the liners are breached. I can feel the wind under my toes. I take a deep breath and think about how I once thought tree bark formed like a scab, like the wood grew it in response to some sort of trauma and due to the harshness of the world it ended up enveloping in the entire tree. I was seven when someone told me I was wrong, and dumb for having thought of it that way.

"Jump motherfucker," Paul yells from below. He brings his hands to his face and blows through them, letting the thickness of the vapor illustrate the thinning of his patience. He tells me he's left his beer inside, so I tell him to take one of mine. I've brought a few out with us. I am jacketless, and my flannel shirt, through in style does nothing to protect me from the woods it was itself inspired by. The bottom button has come undone and miniature hooks of wind circulate inside it, dancing over the skin of my chest and stinging it red.

He strolls over to the bottom of the tree I'm perched within, following my tracks and digs in the drift. "You aren't supposed to put them inside the snow," he explains. "Well. Like you can, but if you set them out on their own, outside the snow they get colder. The air on them. The snow insulates them, so they take longer to cool down." Paul is full of suggestions, is inherently distrustful, and is easily one of my top four friends, though that ranking system is dynamic and in near-constant flux. Admittedly, the fact that he is urging me to jump is putting a strain on his current position. I wonder out loud if the insulating effect of the snow is enough to broker a man's fall, and Paul tells me that I'm no more a man than the beer is cold, but he drinks it anyway.

"I'm older than you," I explain, teetering. "I'm the oldest motherfucker here." I'm slurring now. It had recently dawned on me on the drive to the cabin that out of all my friends I was the oldest. I'm not sure exactly how that came to be, but it was true. I had a good year on all of them, two on most, and the group of guys who'd come with were no exception. It made me feel awkward, tired, unaccomplished by comparison and like a lecherous old man when I pictured their wives naked, which happened often, though mostly unintentionally. None of those wives were here tonight, blissfully. Archaic as it may seem, a weekend away, out of the city, separated from significant others, bosses, loved ones with a troop of males was spiritually cleansing. Whether you wrap it in the banner of a birthday, a work retreat, or like this one, Erik’s bachelor party, it didn’t matter. It was always the same intention. The occasion was the excuse, the real inspiration was the suffocating lives we held, at arms length, but still held none the less in the city. The cabin had been selected from a dozen like it from a resort brochure. Beer and Irish whiskey had been purchased. Gas had been bought. Aside from that, no planning whatsoever had been exercised. We pointed the van in the approximate direction and headed out Friday. Now it was Saturday. Night.

 My phone vibrates in my shirt pocket, a pathetic little protest from the civilized world. No matter what you do, you're never alone anymore. "Do you remember when we didn't have phones all the time," I feel the words fall out of my mouth down towards Paul. "Of course I do goddammit," he yells up. "You're not that much older, Christ. Hurry up." I tell him that thirty-three is plenty old. That they made a show about it. I check the message, and it's from Jill, who is the girl I have been seeing. I get the impression that she isn't interested in me, but she keeps calling anyway, hoping she'll just get used to my bullshit I already can tell I'll never grow out of. I don't tell her that though. The truth of the matter is, I still don't feel like an adult, in any sense of the word and feel like she's hoping she can change that. I wince at the sting of future fights. "how r u guys doing having fun" her message reads.

The branch complains beneath my feet. Earlier Erik had jumped from a comparable, if not higher height, but without the rest of the guys there to confirm, I had declared my soon-to-be perch the highest anyone had gone. Ten minutes ago, pulling on my boots, that’s what I’d said. “You motherfuckers,” I began. “Fine, I won’t do it? I’ll do it in the dark, I don’t even care. Now this is happening. You motherfuckers. “ Reminiscing around a fire that threw about half of the heat we needed, I took a fairly heavy jibbing over my reluctance to jump earlier that day. It didn't make any sense to me, to jump into a snowbank when it was happening on the ground, but when the dick measuring began it seemed even stupider. Playing into my sensible archetype, I complained and got out of the way, called everyone retarded and only watched from the corner of my eye. In the end, it looked like fun, but I wasn't going to give in. Sensible, stubborn, speak before thinking. These days I felt like I was living a version of myself I'd become comfortable with settling for. In that version, I’m not the kind of person who dives into snow drifts, much less, from a tree, much less with the competitive sense of jockish bullshit afternoon beers bring out in the souls of urbanely domesticated men.

                        "This crap is motherfucking freezing," Paul yells.

                        "Then go inside."

                        "No way, you aren't going to break your neck and die alone in the woods."

                        "You're going to be here and help me die socially then? You should live-tweet this whole thing."

"Just get it over with. No one gives a shit about this. We’re going to eat soon." he yells. Almost immediately, now distracted, he changes the topic as drunk men are prone to. "Have you sold any books?" he bellows up. I tell him yeah. The tome in question, a self-published instructional/self-help manual, focusing on combination interval training and life philosophy guide had been selling relatively well. Jill claimed she carried a copy around to show her friends, but I'd never actually seen her with it.

 "I did get some hate mail," I yell down. I tell him I received a number of great comments, and some not so good ones. I tell him about the copy someone had mailed to my publisher that had literally been used to wipe a human ass. A number of bad reviews, some pretty daunting insults sent to my personal email account. A few handwritten ones with impeccably clinical penmanship. "The weirdest one was this guy," I yell, the wind punishing my exposed neck, " the guy with the dick." A reader had sent me a number of digital photos of himself posing with my book. Shot one, the book is open. Shot two, the man's erect penis. Shot three, the man's erect penis on the book. Shot eleven, the man's erect penis stuck, like a bookmark, in the pages. Shot thirty, the man's erect penis punched through a torn hole in the author photo, looking a little like a Pinocchio nose. "That one was pretty interesting," I yell. I take stock. In that moment I wonder if the man with his penis shoved through my picture is wondering where I am, or if he cares. I am beginning to lose my grip. I can't believe this is happening, and my ten minutes without a beer has begun to clear my poisoned head. This is a mistake. So what if I’m not the kind of guy to do stupid dumb shit because his friends are doing it. What does it even matter, to anyone, anywhere, and if it does matter, how sad is that, spending their time on my decisions while I stand happily and safely in the corner? You can lean in a corner.

 Paul is laughing up at me from the ground. It is easily below freezing again, despite the mild afternoon. "I wouldn't take that as hate mail man. This dude sounds like a fan." "Paul he fucked a hole through my head. A friend wouldn't do that," I yell. "Naw man," he argues. He tells me that the man was simply overtaken with passion, and that no real person actually rams their penis through someone's face on purpose. That sort of thing would only happen "on accident" and if they were just "super into it." With this, Paul slides into the position of fifth best friend, pushing Elias from work into fourth. Quite frankly, Erik was looking like he could shift into fifth pretty soon, even though he had only been recently downgraded from third due to that bullshit earlier.

 "I'm going in," says Paul “this isn’t funny anymore” and in response I yell "Fuck it," and push off from the tree. As I do, my foot slips on the icy branch, causing me to tumble straight down, rather than out towards the deep bosom of snow, and instead, I find myself horizontal, directly above the beaten path. The pile of muddy footprints. The burial ground for the afternoon’s beer bottles. The ground we all stood on hours before, traipsing and pounding and condensing the snow into an impervious solid sheet of steel.

  On daytime talk shows, survivors of horrible falls always talk about how it felt like they were "falling forever" and this is total melodramatic bullshit. I hit the ground in less than two seconds. The snow around me doesn't insulate as much as it explodes, and my left foot buckles under me with an obscene pop. My arm rolls under my back and my shoulder vomits the joint out of its socket as the weight of my pelvis shatters my wrist. "Uerf" I yell. "Holy fucking" yells Paul, cutting himself off as he runs not towards me, but back to the house, presumably for help. As he sprints, he slips on the icy ground. His legs fly out behind him and his face punches the driveway with a moist thwump.

 Unable to move much, I look down at my body, sick to my stomach at its betrayal and begin to acknowledge the pain. I try to breathe, though the air has been knocked out of me, and manage to muster half an inhalation. Of all things, I suddenly remember that I have not responded to Jill's text, and realize she is going to be wondering why. I'm usually a very prompt texter, a trait she has told me she thinks is ‘cute.’ I look over at Paul, who looks like he is beginning to stir. "Uerrrffffff" I try to scream, but nothing audible makes it past my lips. He stands up slowly and picks up his beer. He looks towards me, realizes I can see him, drops the beer, and jogs over.

 When he reaches my side, I can see his face is scratched, bleeding lightly and inconsistently like a skinned knee. "I'll be right back," he says. "I'm going there," he points at the cabin. "Ueerrrrrrsssffffssshhh"I say, in thanks. My phone vibrates again, and we both look towards it, we notice the stick. The branch, about the thickness of a thumb is protruding from my chest, roughly two and a half inches through the surface of my shirt. "Oh, oh, oh shit, oh shit," Paul begins to chant. "Urreffssh urrssffh" I try to yell, panicked. When I do, small red bubbles form and pop around the base of the stick. "Oh shit that's in your lung, that's your goddamned lung," Paul begins to scream. "Urrrssssehhh." I don't feel like I've got anything in my lung, but the story checks out. If anything, my foot hurts a lot more than my chest. Paul looks at me, and the blood peeks shyly from the wound. Oh, Hi There.

 While I wait for Paul to stop throwing up and return, the thought dawns on me; What if the phone was two inches to the right? I’d heard the story about the bullet-stopping Bible, or a necklace that deflects a sabre, and wonder if the same thing would have happened with the cell phone. I realize that, no, the branch has pierced through me and blown through my lung from the back, and the most the phone would have done is get scratched.

Within a few moments they load me into the back of the rented van, lying flat. They took surprisingly good care lifting me, and I was impressed at both the compassion and professionalism that comes out of my friends in a crisis. They look heartbroken, and I want to tell them that they shouldn't feel bad. I didn't do this thing because of them, I did it because I was drunk.

Erik leans in close to my face and says "I'm pretty wasted so I'm not going to drive. It’s good though, because I want to sit with you. You're my best friend man, we're going to make sure you're okay." I am touched, and want to tell him he's definitely now my second best friend, but when I try to, I cough and blood comes out of my mouth, so I lightly grip his hand and look straight into his face.

 As we careen down the road, a drunken driver with a car full of even drunker drunks, trying to take care of a drunk, possibly dying man, a classic rock station plays an entire side of a Pink Floyd record before someone shouts they see the sign for the hospital. As we take a sharp turn, Erik, standing on his toes, leaning over me shifts to balance his weight and when he does, he pushes on my good leg and steadies himself and because I am able to help him, even now, like this, I am happy.