Saudade

Who do you miss that will never return? Who do you hate that keeps coming back?

It was in the driver’s side of her truck that she fell apart.

With his song on the radio, in front of god and all who would listen, she screamed, punching her windshield until it became stained glass, red and cracked with the insides of her hand. It brought back the church they faked a wedding in, colored windows casting beautiful shadows across his face. Shadows ushered in the nights they wandered the streets drunk, him asking her all the things she was passionate about, talking for hours before realizing he had only a dreamy smile on his face and not a clue about the French philosophes she spoke of. French was the language he half spoke as they laughed ceaselessly with ugly snorts and sudden convulsions, screaming in bad accents. Then it was the times he covered her mouth so his mom wouldn’t hear them f**k, but to call it f*****g would make it too beautiful and slander it all at once, what they did was carnal, violent, and full of love.

Her windshield was still the colors on his face. The denim she wore on her legs was his vest, the one she gave him. The curls that hid her face, broken with lost helplessness that wanted only to know why, were the curls he ran his fingers through so he could kiss her forehead and blow raspberries on her cheek. The same curls hid his face as he cried, eyes swollen, about the bad memories that he’d only ever shared with her, words cracked and uneven, like all the groggy “I love you”s he murmured n her ear as he shook off sleep at 7am, every day, kissing her and chastising her morning breath. The words he sang through her s****y f*****g speakers were all the words they should’ve said, but instead hid behind hastily built walls that addiction and lost trust built. He called out her praise and begged for forgiveness in a way that he never did when it mattered and the old vacancy in her heart where he used to be was torn open, pouring out anger and hurt that she didn’t know she had the capacity to feel, nor was equipped to cope with as she gasped for air and rocked back and forth, alone but for the voice of the man she loved in her car.

She remembered the time they did salvia with their friends and through the laughter and her quiet tears, how she knew it was over and how he looked more beautiful than ever, the way she’d always imagined he’d look the day they got married for real, colors on his skin casted by cathedral stained glass all the same, the bright translucent figure of Jesus on the face of a true heathen. The moments they had together became grains of sand in an hourglass, something she was never ready for and still wasn’t and never would be. He looked like the sun king that day, hair wild and skin glowing and body too warm and laughter loud like they used to. He was so close to her but kept his distance with staccato stabs to the heart, because he had another girl that he would leave in two weeks to tell her he was wrong and loved her no less.

But he didn’t notice her sobs, not then, not ever, not the times she cried next to his prone, sleeping figure in a dark room with the TV on and too loud as she tried to convince herself love hurt sometimes and that it was okay that it did. And here she was, sobbing as it came back all in a panicked rush. Sobbing was all the times she begged him to get clean and when she cut. Blood on her car was the blood that smeared her skin when she couldn’t handle it anymore. Like when she couldn’t handle it now. His voice on the radio was the voices they both heard in their heads. The voices were what brought them to the mental hospital where they met. The day they met was when she realized she wasn’t so f*****g alone. Alone like when she took too many pills and tried to die, like when he hoarded old foils because he felt like he could die. Alone in each others’ arms. Alone in the world but for each other. And here she sat, alone and screaming like the wounded animal she was in the parking lot of a motel on the side of an ill-maintained road in the desert of an Arizona town at three in the morning, near where his dealer used to live, with blood all over her like she used to do, not knowing why she was here, with his voice, tinny and artificial, filling her car like he used to, telling her there was no one else now that there was and how lost he was without her just as she’d found her way, knocking her from her feet and shoving her ragdoll body down so she could scream and punch her windshield until her bloodied knuckles gurgled pleas for mercy.

He left and she lost something indescribable within herself. He wasn’t her world but he was by far the most incredible thing it had in it. English did not prepare her for the love she felt for him, and English was not prepared to describe it, or the emptiness she felt now. For the first time in her life, words did not flow freely simply because there were no words that existed for him or her or them and their world. They could only describe the breaths between moments in the flow of time where they grew roots into each other. In another lifetime. Because he called her by her full name, like no one else. Because she called him beautiful, like no one else. Because they knew each other, like no one else.

With little to speak for her vision other than violent tears, she wrapped her arms around her steering wheel, knowing somewhere in the back of her mind that her torn throat was moaning “why”, not knowing what she was asking or who. She didn’t need to know who opened her car door and who apologized, who mumbled hasty and shaky explanations and held on to her like he’d never let go. It was like him to show up now. It was so like him that he would be up at this hour, walking by her, recognizing her ugly, tear stained face. He loved her. And how f*****g dare he.

She drove away.

It was in the parking lot of the Budget Suites motel where he was buying meth that he broke down.

Author's Note

it's terribly verbose, but I can't determine where and what to thin out; I'm sure there are a few grammar errors, I rarely edit for grammar. Constructive crit DESPERATELY wanted.