We’re in the car together and we're not quite lost, but we're far from found. The heater is turned up to 4, we're driving aimlessly along the coast waiting for the engine to warm up the air, we're talking in hushed tones and whispers and we're murmuring a stream of thought, half spoken and a quarter implied, and a quarter lost.

She’s telling me a story of how she breaks into houses as a demonstration of her free will and I’m thinking that I’ve been here before, a long time ago. My ear canals ache. The wind on the beach in the springtime will cut right through you, a servant of the ocean, so cold, so dark and deep. I focus on the dotted lines, playing ping-pong with the car like I’m drunk. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I feel sick to my stomach. She doesn't taste the same as she used to taste. I concentrate on the feeling of sand between my toes inside of my socks and I’m trying to count the grains and the fibers and the cigarette in my hand is about to fall on the floor. I’ll search for it, blindly, find it by heat alone, smelling the smoldering carpet.

She’s telling me a story of ghosts and gods and graveyards, and I’m laughing on the inside - but not a healthy laughter filled with joy or one of carelessness, instead: the laughter of the malignant, filled with irony and a taste like bile, or corrosion. I feel a growing sense of distrust in this woman as my earaches subside, but I reach for her hands anyway, and she takes mine into hers as if she were eager for the contact. I ask her to marry me, again, because it's all a part of this destructive chain of events we always pull from within ourselves, and I see no reason to change the script, no matter how much or how little the stage has been rearranged. Again, she declines, reminding me to keep my eyes on the road.

We’re our own little symphony of fucked up reactions to each other.

I take aim for the ditch, the phone poles; I take aim for the tractor-trailer's headlights in the opposite lane. I take aim for anything substantial and immediately deadly, anything to bounce out of the scratch in the record, anything to release the pause button of this same endless cut-scene.

I change my mind, steady the wheel, and I drive on.

 

 

 

WHY SHOULD I QUESTION THIS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"It's so loud in here sometimes.  Sometimes Nothing is all that you can hear."

 

 

"My heart hurts,"