Why do people meet behind the wood and not in the wood? Surely the trees would provide cover? Don’t you have to pass through the wood to get behind it? Maybe that’s the point. Maybe this kind of meeting warrants effort. For months J. and I had kept our distance. The only time I made any effort was once when we ran into each other in the bank and I asked her if she’d like to go for a coffee but she declined and it was probably for the best. What if we’d been seen? People talk even when there’s nothing to talk about and there was nothing to talk about. 

My dad asked me if J. and I were in a relationship. It’s an annoying little preposition. It’s not enough for us to love someone, we have to be in love with them. Both J. and I were going through our respective somethings in 1994. We were both very much in our individual woods. So I think I’m being presumptuous here in assuming either one of us had made it to the clearing beyond it. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking. 

Why the title’s in quotes I couldn’t tell you. I can find several people who’ve used the expression—Shakespeare, Tennyson, Turgenev—but none of them ring a bell.