Does it matter that I’m in a car instead of a bus if I’m still just crashing? There’s blood on my face, on my hands, I loved you and I worried we were going to crash the entire time. Found myself in PDF files and walks without shoes on, 10 over the limit at 2am wondering how, and why now, and does it have to end. You tell me I’ll get through it, and everything about you makes me want to cry.
We walk home together in the dark, and if we’d had a before it would look like that. (But there is no before, for all the time we grew up together I still was facing the back of your head. This is the first time in our lives we’ve been side by side.) Our before is the precursor to violence. A threat that never was (and you still say that you’re afraid of me).
You drive me home in the dark, and I ask if I really need to go home, and you don’t care so we go anywhere else. Talk about anything and everything and I turn my phone off and forget that I need to exist outside of the car. I can breathe, on the freeway at quarter past midnight.
It’s still dark and I’m calling lights up on you on stage, and maybe that’s where it started. I walk into that theatre and they know my name, but he still looks at me like he doesn’t know what my next move will be, and sometimes you look at me like that too. Like you’re still seeing the kid I was, like that’s how you’ll remember me. Jokes about quitting turned into not quite jokes, and I remember that I didn’t know how to make you stay. In the end I had nothing to do with it.
You’re in front of me, and I’m holding hands with your girlfriend and she’s important to me too. She sat with me and walked with me and she didn’t change like I did from when I knew her. I have a before with her that I don’t have with you. We take our shoes off and I tell her I don’t quite feel real and she tells me it won’t last forever. She’s in the car with us and we’re at the end of a pier together, all holding hands. We’re sitting on the beach, all leaning on eachother. We’re in her house, knocked over like dominoes.
It’s easier to pick yourself back up when someone else can see the picture you make. It’s easier to put myself in your hands, in your car, and focus on breathing, focus on squeezing her hand, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2. Three of us in a car, on a dock, in a park, on a freeway. It’s the second time I’ve felt like a teenager in my whole life. I feel like I am 17 finally, after years of being in my 20s. Time is crawling by and if it moved faster I fear I’d break beyond repair.
I go home to my half empty house of closed doors and expectations, and it’s late and they don’t ask where I was (they know I’ll lie anyways) and I tell my mother that I’m anxious, but she’s only been good at taking care of me when I’m taking care of myself. I sit with her and nothing changes. I live with her and nothing changes. She asks when I'll be back, and I look at her and I say “mom.” and she says “okay” and I know I am not making it easier for her. In my dreams, her best friend tells me that they deserve it for what they put me through.
My shadow and yours on the pavement down the road I walked four times each day. The streetlights bend towards me, and I need to make sure that I’m still here. It hurts, in a muted sort of numb-feel-nothing way. It’s only the rest of my life ahead of me. We stop at my driveway, red light ominous behind us and you tell me it’ll be okay, and ask me not to text you once I’m inside. Everyday I might never see you again, that’s what this means. We’re all freed from this town, and I’m certainly not sticking around. I wish you were. I wish I hadn’t started this now. I wish I had time to explain what I mean.
If I could write us an ending I would still be sitting in your car. I’d be sitting in your car at a stoplight, and I’d look over at you and tell you I love you, I can’t stand you, I’ll miss you, I love you. In my version we still don’t get a happy ending. The car hits us headon and only one of us survives.
When you’ve been waiting for one moment, for 13 years, and you expect it to happen in one day and it instead happens over the course of several months, what does that make you? A liar? The perfect vibrant painting of the woods you hung over your window to a parkinglot. You’ve ripped through it now, too eager to see the stars from the roof one last time. To look over your shoulder like a thief, in the red light of your window. Remember the sunrises? Remember the years spent here? It will stop meaning anything soon.
Todays still just a mondaytuesdaywednesday. Tomorrows still just a thursdayfridaysaturday. Sunday doesn’t exist. Unless you text me about it.
I’ve been feeling a lot like I’m 12 again. Brand new in a world that hurts. Hiding, packing for a half-baked plan. Waking up to empty houses and notifications from everyone except you. I drove past your house, and your car was there. I drove past the house that used to be mine, and I didn’t stop but I wanted to. I drove past the house I grew up in and flinched.
I take in every moment like a polaroid camera. One second and then it’s gone. Everyday feels like years ago, time stretches behind me, and I can’t see the future at all. You remind me I’m real, and I punch you on the walk home to confirm it. Otherwise the shadows look like me by myself, in the dead of May.
I can’t see the ending. It’s a car crash, and the lights go down. It’s another car crash. They’re all car crashes. It’s you, it’s me, it’s both of us and neither of us all at once. Violence and a single moment, and then pain that stretches like the past ahead of me. I’m sitting at an intersection and I want to tell you that I love you, but I don’t know who I am. I wonder if you know anyways. (I call a standby. There’s another car crash).
Days that pass fade without you, I wake up in the middle of the night behind the wheel.