Stories of a Doe

Coming of age as a late bloomer is decidedly cruel, especially when all your friends are hot. I got to everything late. I got my first period on the half birthday of my 15th year. I looked like I was 12 until I was 15, and by then, I already had a reputation – my friends joked about their escapades with quips about my purity, using “WWPD” (What Would Paige Do) as mantras to discourage unruly behavior. I was the cold shower.

Looking back, I knew I was popular, but I also knew I was a punchline, in some respects. I didn’t get bullied, I got patronized. An adorably spazzy cheerleader. An easy target for innocent, but incessant, teasing. An all-American overachiever who lost student council elections 3 years in a row. I wasn’t uncomfortable at parties – I’ve always been an extrovert – but I think everyone thought I was because of my omnipresence of awkwardness. My friend once compared me to a deer, stumbling around on spindly legs with wide eyes, either looking to everyone else for a plan or running away from headlights.

I was never really that approachable. I was constantly nervous and unsure of the idea of myself, paralyzed by a fear of looking, acting, feeling dumb. I was always that deer in the middle of the road.

I once made out with one of my best guy friends at a party and didn't know what to do about it after. It resulted in an 8-month depression and a devastating blow to what confidence I had. He ignored me, I powered through a hell-scape of a senior year, and went to college without so much as a second look back. He’s a brickmason now, and just got married to a 22-year-old I’ve never heard of.

The thing people forget about deer, though, is that they’re big. They’re forces of nature. They’ll smash in your windshield and walk away like nothing even happened.

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After begging my college boyfriend to not dump me, I think he felt bad for me. Or he just liked the sex. Before moving away from the town that cultivated our manic, Swiftian situationship, I insisted on a final evening together, and I think he just felt guilty for his role in turning me into another crazy ex-girlfriend. His only feeling was guilt, and I think he got off on it. We micro-dosed on mushrooms and walked around outside of his eerily-serene rental house at sunset. The things he liked most were drugs and the idea of himself.

Soft, late-summer light peeked through the leaves and cast translucent shadows across the pavement – something you only notice when you’re on hallucinogenics. Everything is quieter when you’re focused on it, and everything is bigger when you feel like your body is hollow.

It was August but it felt like June, sending me back in time. Trees framed his backyard like a vignette. They darkened the corners and closed in on us, freezing this feeling of melancholy nostalgia and helplessness. I was trapped in a vortex of crushing loss and supercut feelings. He just got to go on with his life. I was the one who’d suffer after all this.

While we walked down the empty street, just as night began to blow through the trees, a doe and a fawn walked out from the woods. They looked our way, and didn’t run, just slowly crossed the road and continued their evening grazing. I cried, and it felt like a sign.

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As a kid, my family took a twice-yearly road trip to Ohio, then Michigan, to see my parent’s families in each respective state. The drives were long, but flying was never an option. My mom was claustrophobic, she could barely manage a car. Plus, flying was expensive.

There was a cruel summer that, for some reason, sent the animals into a frenzy. Blankets of dead cicadas covered the ground. They crunched beneath my feet, hard one second and dust the next. They would dive bomb you the second you went outside in a biblical, apocalyptic narration of nature and man.

The same year, the deer seemed to be on the same doomsday wavelength. They littered the highway our entire drive, their blood sickly dark in contrast to the sun reflecting on the asphalt. Their lives cut short by 80-mile-per-hour machines slicing their mountains apart like peaches. It’s so hard to figure out when the flesh is sweetest, but regrettably, we did. The deer are just the price we’re willing to pay. The cicadas, clogging gutters and piling up in the corners of porches, they invade space that wasn’t there when they burrowed underground 17 years before. We built cities around them and grow angry when they get caught in our hair. I know they are not an omen, they are a cycle, but the stars run on cycles and they have always predicted our folly.

animals are far wiser than us, but somehow they are always the first victim.