(don't ask me what this is about cause I have no idea)
"J, just get in the car"
I buckled.
I used to think that life was interconnected. That humans were living dominoes. That we were all just part of a web, delicately spun, intricately woven.
Life had happened a moment too soon. I had stains on my hands that weren't washing off. And they had spread too. It had gotten in my hair, on the inside of my fleshy eyelids, behind me knee caps, in the creases of my elbows. It was a mistake, and the effects of it were splashed on every ounce of me.
Cracked windows let in crisp waves of fall and his hair flipped and curled around his ears as the lights changed...
Red, green, yellow.
I sat in the passenger seat of the car and let his gaze dangerously pierce my skin with the gentle pressured of an unwound paperclip, knowing his eyes were completely off the road.
I couldn't remember the last time I'd let that happen. It was October and we were soaring. We'd been driving since dawn, downing bottles of Jim Beam, reckless, swerving on untraveled roads. We found a dirt path that snaked into the middle of pines, bounced, spun up gravel, and parked the car for the night.
I'm here.I feel the engine cool and notice the sky is an ink spill of plum and Egyptian blue. I pull off my socks, crank the chair into the lowest possible position and stick my feet out the window. My pale skin is translucent in the moonlight and I paint the sky with the chipped magenta of my toenail polish.
Sid had climbed backward with the clicking of the ignition and had immediately passed out drunk in the back seat. I reach around the chair and pull a cigarette from the pocket of his jeans. I watch the lighter flicker and burn as the familiar scent swirls into autumn.
My heart contracts, and relaxes. I think of BIO 101. I picture the atria and ventricles working together to send blood through my veins. Electric, pulsing, pumping. I am an outlet and my wishful thinking is that someday soon the wires will snap and I'll fizzle out.
But I am an outlet.
I am an outlet and he's got me plugged in.