Aspen Matis - Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

PRAISE FOR YOUR BLUE IS NOT MY BLUE

Aspen Matis is a hero and inspiration. Your Blue Is Not My Blue will open the door to empathy, compassion, and healing for you and all those affected by you.

Deepak Chopra, author of Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential

Your Blue Is Not My Blue is a sudden classic. Matiss poetic language renders such a shocking story relatable and tear-jerking. She is a champion with a tender heart and fierce courage. This book isnt for reading, but rather for transforming the filter and frame through which we view life and each other. A masterpiece!

Kelly Sullivan Walden, author of I Had the Strangest Dream

PRAISE FOR GIRL IN THE WOODS

Beautiful and so wildly engaging.

Lena Dunham, author of Not That Kind of Girl

Mercy. I love this story.

Cheryl Strayed, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild

A lovely tribute to the healing power of wilderness.

Nicholas Kristof, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary

ALSO BY ASPEN MATIS

Girl in the Woods: A Memoir

Text copyright 2020 by Aspen Matis

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Little A, New York

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

Lyrics to Come Back Here used with permission from David Lockwood.

ISBN-13: 9781542007894 (hardcover)

ISBN-10: 1542007895 (hardcover)

ISBN-13: 9781542007917 (paperback)

ISBN-10: 1542007917 (paperback)

Cover design and illustration by Liz Casal

First edition

For my extraordinary parents

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

Chronology has been altered for literary cohesion, and some names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

PART I

ASHES

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

MAN IN THE WOODS

Id first met Justin by stunning coincidence in the summer of 2009 when we were hikingseparatelyin shaded pinewood forests, backpacking from Mexico to Canada. Wed given up indoor plumbing, beds, and friends, both hiding shameful reasons for abandoning our lives. Nineteen years old, I had dropped out of my college, disappearing. He was nearly thirty, lean and tall with pale sapphire eyes; and I was drawn to him, curious what had taken him into these dark woods. As he smiled, his puffy lips became slightly asymmetrical, the bottom one pinker, and a shadow of scruff darkened his hollowed cheeksso handsome I couldnt look away.

Held in his piercing powder-blue vision, I froze. A butterfly awakened in my chest.

For almost four months Id been walking alone, trekking northward, unaware that this man had been trailing me, tracking my line of footsteps, ever-nearing. On the August day he caught me, wind moaning as we spoke, two souls alone in the trees, we discovered that he had also started off at the Mexican border in Apriljust two days after I had. For two thousand miles wed been walking in nearly perfect sync. Having long endured identical terrain, our union seemed fated.

We stepped together for one hundred miles; then, two hundred. Under gold clouds, he pushed the limits of my body, setting a faster pacesome days surpassing forty rugged miles, unstopping through mornings thick peach haze; noons warmth; red evening sun. I surrendered into his intensity with growing affection for the challenge. And each night by silver starlight, I set up my little tent, which fast-became our home.

One day in mid-September in the remote Indian Heaven Wilderness, walking together in quiet wonder, we traversed a lake-jeweled land carpeted with low bushes of ripe berries; in a murky fern-green valley, we arrived at the weather-worn trunk and dead branches of a fallen tree, deep roots erodedtheir strong hold gone, cut out of black earth by the steady grating of the river. Balancing like an acrobat, wanting desperately to drop to my knees and crawl, I faked confidence as I tightroped over freezing pulsing waters, their current violent and storm-cloud steel. On land again, the other side, I stood in awe of Justins apparent fearlessness. I felt powerful, bolder in his presence.

That night in cool milk moonlight, he brought out the little stove hed been carrying. Over the bloom of a blue-gold flame, he cooked pasta elbows in butter. For us, he said. Everything I had eaten on the trail in the long months pre-Justin had been cold. With my first big bite, the warm fat of creamy starch dissolved in my watering mouth.

Talking into the small hours of bitter winds, an arctic gust stinging our exposed cheeks, he told me about the aggressive fire that had burned down his childhood house. His baseball card collection, everything that had meant anything to him, was gone forever. He was eleven. My family never discussed it.

Im sorry, I whispered, squeezing his palm for the first time.

Four hundred fifty miles into our shared hike, a whiteout hailstorm high on a ridge trapped us at dusk. In blinding snow-fog I became colder and colder, unable to close my hands. Shaking, I felt strange burning, fumbling to remove my iced shirt from my torso.

Immediately Justin stripped off all his clothesshockingly risking his own safety to give me all his warmth, my faint body at the verge of actual freezing. Behaving like a medic, Justin told me to sip his water as he set up our tent, his naked skin pink with biting hail and wind. Inside our cloth shelter, my hands heated up against his stomach, my cheeks thawed against his neck.

Cuddling in our sleeping bags wrapped in nights indifferent air, he asked me distracting questions, trying to take my mind off the dead cold. My favorite flavor of ice cream? And what was it I wanted to do with the rest of my life?

Salted Caramel Core, I mumbled. You have any? I smiled slightly, my upper lip so stiff that it split from the pressure of just this small movement. He brushed my mouth with his thumb, wiping away a crack of blood. My thoughts broad strokes in the mind-mist of near-hypothermia, I confided that I wanted to someday be a writer.

He kissed my mitten. Then well get you to New York, he said. He described Manhattan as an epicenter of creativity, a midnight tar-paved island where the young artists of the world go to pursue themselves. Listening, growing warmer, I peered up through the tents mesh roof at faraway stars, faint glitter, giddy.

Justin told me that hed lived in the famous city just two years ago, wearing a suit to work in finance. More resourceful now that hed survived out of a backpack for half a year, he insisted the expensive metropolis wasnt as unaffordable as people claimed. Ive got some tricks, he promised. He pressed a quick peck on my cheekbone, his lips softI moved toward him, mouths locking in blue velvet space, smiling.

That night he nearly froze keeping me alive.

I woke from shivering sleep to find Id suddenly fallenI loved him.

Feeling better on the footpath the next morning, we picked plump huckleberries, frosted silver with bloom-wax like summer plums. Lingering in a bush, we invented names for our make-believe children: our boy Winter and little girl Marin. I was exhilaratedstill a teenager, I had never discussed parenthood with a man or even had a real boyfriend yet; and my hands, grasping at fruits, became unsteady. The berries stained my fingers and mouth unearthly purple; Justin snapped a photo, smirking. But I didnt care. Walking together, I imagined he was leading me into a secret future.