THE SOUND OF THE TREES AND PASSING CARS
I took the drive alone.
I searched for a good place to watch the moon make its pass and think about the street lights that swelled and died every time I drove under. I thought of how scared she got when she talked about them, curled up in the backseat in a dreamworld, in a place where tennis balls fly over the darkest clumps of trees imaginable. In those places- when Sam says things in my ear but I don’t respond because I can’t understand- in those places are real fear. The clouds lurking up and beyond the sight of us five, slumped together in a creaking tent, stomach bubbling and boiling with a lost hunger, I should have eaten more. I should eat, I haven’t much in days, I’ve lost the sense of it.
She tells me to eat with her pictures, still I can’t bring myself to do it.
I watched the sun fall into the horizon while the rest of them walked away. They walked away from freedom.
I had found myself alone earlier, in a decrepit campsite filled with mysterious mud and cautious cans of diet soda. Michael has his disease. One day it might kill him.
One day it might give him mortality.
I searched for them in the woods. I followed paths that we had made earlier, forcing my body through the tightest gaps in the trees. The weight of the branches and a sudden sadness pissed me off, made me immune to the everywhere sticks and twigs that tore into my arms and made little red bumps rise along my ankles.
Nothing.
No one.
So when I watched that pack of hyenas streak across the gated fields under the sunset. So when we sat in that field and I couldn’t bring myself to say anything interesting. So when I was so angry I couldn’t feel anymore. I lost control. I was angry at the me I wanted to be, how different and how fucking pathetic it is.
I should be content with this thing I’m trapped in, the burning fire behind my ears always reminding me that yes this is not the end yet and no this can’t ever begin but if you try really hard you might find a reason to hope and if that isn’t enough for you then run.
You’re right. I am running.
Right now I am turning around.
I am facing it full on, forcing my head through the hands of the waves and rubbing the ice into my pores. Before that moment alone I had temporarily forgotten to laugh.
After burgers we lay in the tent.
She said something.
I smiled.
And then the floodgates eroded to dust, and then and only then could I yell. Now I can stop in the wettest of tunnels and find hope.
I will someday sit at a desk, wherever it is, and grin at whomever walks by and remember this time when I was afraid, too afraid to admit something, too afraid to say hello, too afraid to move closer, too afraid to eat. Turning away from the sun and the sound of the trains, watching the moon from the school parking lot where I grew up, being locked out of my home, it will make me laugh then.
When I find my composure I’ll place both hands on my desk and trace swirls in the wood, and write.
Why couldn’t I have said this to you in the drains?
