Breakdown

            You avert your eyes when the waitress walks by, seeking, quietly anxious in her search for the right place to drop her plate of food. You do it without even thinking; a subconscious slide from the place where she might recognize you, thinking it’s you who ordered this rapidly cooling grilled cheese. Or mistake you for who she’s been looking for.

3 days before

            It’s simple, really. We’ve been on the road for ten minutes: the truck is gassed up and the highway is empty, I’m picking the chocolaty bits from our trail mix, and one of his hands is still free. I grab it. We’ve come to that place in our knowing each other where it’s okay for me to do things like this without asking—but not so far that I’ve adjusted to the ripple of pleasure each time that I do. I find myself stopping more often with him, accidentally finding constellations as I close the small gate to his backyard—as if pulling myself from the moment suspends it somehow, and will allow me to access it later when beauty feels lost. They’re unassuming, these moments: so modest in their perfection. Like folding his hand back and forth as the ocean whips past, depositing sugary almonds inside of his lips as he smiles.

            It’s my turn to pick a song. “I’ll go alphabetically,” I say, ticking through a laundry list of A and B names, not wanting to pick the wrong song. What is the wrong song? I settle on Ace of Base and immediately regret it, but his palm is right there, and he hasn’t pulled it away. I answer the phone with my free hand, use my voice to ask questions about mileage and rotors to a man who is selling his car; and the man to my left flickers slightly, but stays with his eyes on the road. The song ends, and we lurch in spontaneous bursts of gridlock, the road as effortlessly congested as it was clear only moments before. He dips his head down to the steering wheel, winces, and brakes. “Fucking traffic,” he growls, slipping his hand from my grip. “Did you find a new song?”

            “Working on it,” I say, encouraging each toe to unclench as I hoist my boots onto the dashboard. We can do things like this, him and I; because I know the way he drinks coffee, and he lets me leave shirts at his house. The periphery ebbs as we flow. “What do you want to hear?” I ask, lingering over Nirvana.

            He laughs. “Pick a song,” he says, and finally moves to fourth gear.

2 days before

            “I just can’t accept that kind of favor from you,” I tell him, jabbing at my plate of fish tacos. In my hurry to eat, I’d forgotten to ask for no dairy, and a mound of fried snapper stares up as I pick out each tendril of cheese.

            “Why not?” He asks, swiveling on his stool.

            “Because,” I whisper, aware that—even in my hesitation to answer his question, and the eerie warmth of California winter nights, and the overly-sterile smell of the diner countertop—that a small part of me is elated to be important, important enough to offer money to. “I’ve heard you talk about how you’ve helped people out…but always at the expense of yourself. And I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want you to grow to resent me.”

            “This is nothing like that,” he answers, voice gentle, but body bending away as he shakes his head down at his plate. “This is taking advantage of something in the moment. You need a car, right? And a man in this city wants to sell you a car. You can pay me as soon as the loan goes through… so whether you take me up on it or not, this is nothing like that.

            “I could never resent you.”

            I squeeze his hand and imagine what we look like to others, painlessly losing all track of the time. We clear our tray and walk to the drug store, halfheartedly browsing through candy. I realize I’m still nervous, that a part of me must sense the water between us, and still wants to want what he wants: even though he has told me his secrets, even though we eat off the same plate. “Gummies or chocolate?” he asks, looking at me from across the Good & Plenty’s. I narrow it down by category and price, spinning off on ingredients, waiting to hear him say yes. But he doesn’t.

1 day before

            We walk on the beach with our backs against the sun, watching shirtless men and spandex-ed women in various states of exercise, exhaling each time that they pass. I loop under his arm and chatter about something or other, feeling the air crisp my skin. “I had no idea people still rollerblade,” he says lightly, crinkling his nose; and right then, if I’d never kissed him, I would have. I did.

            “I’m not good at this,” he tells me later, spitting a thin stream of smoke at the sky. I’m sitting on the porch, robe falling off my right arm like a film that’s come loose. “This is new for me.

            “When I say I don’t care, it’s not that I don’t care about you. I just don’t care about arguments, picking apart the relationship. You’re… you’re beautiful.”

            With that, he sits down at my side.

            “But you’re a lot of car.”

            I wiggle my nose at his shoulder, feeling for humor, for ease. I string words together; rearranging sentences like furniture, watching the pillows take shape. I wait for him to notice, sit down; to put his boots up, take my hand back to where we’d begun. But the weight of our bodies knows better. “The car I’m buying is pretty,” I say finally. “I like the color. But the aesthetic is only a bonus.”

            “Like YOU!” he laughs, mushing my face with his thumb.

            “That’s the same way I feel about you.”

Before

            “I’ll meet you there,” I mutter. “You’ve done so much already. I don’t want you to get back on the freeway and sit in traffic. I’ll pick up our stuff and just meet you there.”

            The key is in my hand, the key to a car that’s been sold by a man with red spots on his face, from a house that makes fungus seem ritzy. I’m staring across at the other man, the one I love, whose face betrays nothing but space. I watch our words trail out in front of our mouths, tangling in the air and then reordering into a handful of movement and sounds. His eyebrows knot, and I get in my car; watching us watch one another in mirrors, waiting for something to crack.

            I pick up our bags from the house on the corner, lopsidedly shuffling down stairs. I wonder if cities have baggage, like people—if our romance was dropped in a vat of bad karma, essentially fried from the start. The car starts by coughing, so I sit for a moment; praying that I heard it wrong, perhaps misunderstood it. If I keep moving forward, give motion, just breathe, this will all be some sort of mistake.

             Last night, when I lay down beside him, he flipped himself over and snored.

            I ease onto the freeway, pleading to the radio buttons—to the steering wheel, the chipped vent, anything—to keep me safe, just this once. Please, just this once, let it stop.

            And it does. It stops. At the place where the freeways combine, on a bridge overlooking the city—that damned vat of oil, the place where we burned—my car becomes quiet and dies. “No,” I say aloud. “No, no, no.” I search for the hazards as cars swarm around me, droning their horns as the sun trickles down. Trembling fingers press every button, then open the door—I watch headlights slam, bug-eyed, toward me. Halfway out, the car starts to roll, and I clamber back in for the brake. Then, without thinking, I run for the side—never stopping to panic, or think. That’s the thing about living: you don’t question it until you turn back and look. With my hands on the rail, as the road rushed behind me, I didn’t have time to “survive.” I just did. But as soon as I stared into traffic—the thick stream of trucks, careening out of the way of my dark, lonely car—my legs said it’s over, and failed. 

            I remember waking up with his head on my cheek, the tangle of hair at my neck. His eyes opened slowly and we burrowed together, not committed to consciousness yet. An inhale of breath as he hovered to see me, corners of his mouth still crusted with sleep as he touched his lips to my nose. “You’re something special,” he whispered, cupping my jaw in his hand. The spaces between us were small.

            By the time the ambulance arrives, my phone is dead, and the mirror has been clipped off my car. They drive me to a church parking lot, are you okay, are you okay, and tell my boyfriend—is there someone we can call? —where to find me. He pulls up and walks over, all handshakes and smiles, but his legs give away what’s inside. They shake as he tugs me, one-handed, toward him: defying the length of his arms as they wrap and keep wrapping around.

“Do you have any idea?” He whispers, crumpling into my spine. Any idea of what? Of how frightened he felt when he thought he might lose me? Of how glad he was to see me whole? Of the simple perfection of brushing our teeth, making toothpasty grins at each other? Or the fact that I never know what he is thinking, or how to make words he can hear?   

“Do you have any idea?”

“Do you have any idea?”

I do, but he’s already gone.

After

            We sit across the table from one another, a small expanse of linoleum and about a thousand miles between us. A woman behind the counter shuffles cups back and forth, expertly snapping small pastries into plastic cases with a press of her thumb.

“God, is this even coffee?”

I look up and notice the lines on his face, running like rivers—some deeper, some new—inward, seeking a source or the pool of his eyes, or the thumbprint of tiredness beneath them.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, turning my attention to the deck of cards on the bookshelf beside us. They’re tarot cards, worn at the edges, with pastel flowers spiraling over each surface. I remember the woman who gave me a tarot reading, and the milky sound that her words seemed to make as she spoke.

There’s a tower, she said. And a gift. The tower needs to fall away, though, before the opening can occur. For true change to take place, the illusions you’re holding must die. It’s only once the foundation crumbles, breaks down, that you’ll find your true power. It’s there that the healing occurs.

 I drop the deck onto the table, waving my hands and rolling my face to the sky, pulling three cards with an exaggerated flick of my wrist. “Your future,” I tell him, lowering my voice to a hiss. “Is in the cards.”

He flips them over: Forgiveness. Guidance. Growth.

He asks me which one we should read about, and I look in his eyes. His words, barely audible, flash like a small match of life in his eyes; but just as I reach them, they’re gone. “I don’t know,” I tell him. “Which one do you want?”

“Just make a decision,” he answers, cold. “For once.”

A pause. “Are we done here?”

I remember the way that I felt in the car, looking out at the freeway, my life as delicate as a coil of truth. I want to stand up and scream at his forehead, boil the muscle memory of fear—our shared horror—to the surface. “I almost DIED!” I want to tell him. “If you can’t look at me now, then when? WHEN?” But I don’t, because speech is too wobbly. And sometimes, one word is enough. “Yes,” I tell him. We’re done here.

We stand up.

We move.

Now

            When the waitress passes, depositing her plate, you lower your eyes to your hands. They’ve clenched fists, they’ve lived, and they’ll probably melt as you’re aging. They’ve skimmed the soft craters atop babies’ heads. They’ve closed doors and scabbed up and latched onto branches; they’ve opened and clapped loud and traced every groove in a face. They’ve listened, they’ve lingered, they’ve given you something to hold.

And when the time comes to leave, they’ll let go.