In his favourite memories she is there and she is driving. He never knows where they are going, but that isn’t his failing mind (or body) so much as the fact that she never knew either. It was a habit of hers, to leave without knowing why or where, without caring with whom she left. Sometimes, she’d say, you just have to escape. And when you do, you just need to go. In those months they’d spent together, he had been a regular in aiding and abetting her getaways. She’d call him and all she’d say was, “Want to runaway with me?” He’d say yes of course, every time, because he always wanted to run away with her.
And so they would take to the highways with the windows down and the music up. She would always speed — incredibly so — and he would laugh at her, half worried and half impressed that she had such disregard for life. She’d roll her eyes and slow down for a little while until a song she loved would play, when the volume would surge higher and the speedometer would inch upwards again.
When she hated the music her speed would temper and the volume turn low. Then they would talk: about the world and her thoughts and his dreams and their history. She would laugh at him and at his rigidity, at the formality and normality of his life plan. He would grin at her belief that he could be so much more, would feel like he was a secret knight-in-armour or her own personal superhero. He was here to save her.
His least favourite memories are about her, too. He can clearly recall the months after she stopped talking to him. It was not a blur for him as some others had since described it. He can remember the friends and their nervous smiles, can remember the night when he forbade them to say her name ever again. He remembers running into her sister once in the street and the awkward conversation between two people whose only point in common was her. He remembers the pain of wondering how she could leave him, wondering how there had been no warning and wondering if there was anything he could have done to fix it.
He can recall the last fight they ever had, can clearly see her hands close around the keys on her way out and he remembers thinking (with a flash of pain) that instead of being her partner in crime he had become her prison.
And he remembers, very clearly, when she didn’t come home. When the knock at the door was a policeman rather than a contrite girlfriend who had forgotten her house keys. He can still see the grim look in the man’s eye, still remembers thinking that this man had seen more than he ever wanted (because who joins the force to give bad news?) and that his first instinct was to comfort the officer and make him feel better for having to tell him.
His second instinct was to say ‘bullshit’ and call her to admonish her for putting everyone through this worry.
He doesn’t remember his instincts after that, just remembers feeling like he’d been punched in the gut and stabbed in the chest at the same time. He remembers feeling like he couldn’t breathe, like the world had dropped from underneath him. He remembers having to sit down. He remembers not believing it.
And then he remembers trying to live through it when the person he was building a life with was gone, remembers keeping her image as a personal angel for him. He held onto the thought of her through every possible commitment, every obligation, every moment of love and hate and pain. Especially pain. And now, years later, the enduring image is of her; she is behind a steering wheel, her face turned to him and laughing as she edges the speedometer ever higher, trying to take him to where he wants to go as quickly as possible. And when his mind is failing as surely as his body, when he can only think about how tired he is all the time, he thinks perhaps he’d really just like to go to her.
4 comments
20th Apr 11
strawberryhope
