Hello! Recently, I feel like I’m always supposed to be somewhere doing something, but I can’t remember where and what. It’s like I forgot to log an event on Google Calendar, and so, without the notifications, I’m forced to live with this subtle but constant dread. All the same, my days are good and the grass is green and each morning I wake up underneath a skylight & watch the clouds roll by in their impartiality.
I’m too anxious to write. So I don’t think I’ll do so until I’m forced to next semester. But here’s this little number, which, sadly, I already dislike!
It is It is It is:
They were past it now, Jack and Rose, onto the open road where silence filled the space. She drove, shuffling their playlist. He rode passenger, hand on her lap; squeezing it to pin down their love. Cow. Pole. Barn. Hay. In the Nelspruit farmland, things looked like they felt. Distant and blurred. Going, going, gone. It was a weekend in the countryside, two days without obligations. It was back to their lives now.
They’d met through Dave, a mutual friend. He worshipped Kate Winslet and believed in omens so promised the blind date would be a hit. And it was sparks at once, an intellectual dance. Two minds tangoing, pulling in and out, twisting each other at the turn of their words.
Building, building, even now, as Rose stepped on the gas and Jack began:
“Rose.” // “Love?” // “I—” “—We don’t have to—” “—I’d like to.” // “Okay.” // “I think, I think I have to go.” // “Right.” // “And I think you have to stay.” // “I see.” // It’s just—” “— The city.” // “Yes.” // It’s too much.” // “Yes. And you’ve got it figured it out. You’ve got the new job and the close friends and the things you’ve always wanted.” // “But you—” “—This life isn’t mine.” // “So you’re going.” // “I’m going. Back to the farm or farther out, anywhere that calls for me. And we’ll be okay, alright? Even if we aren’t together. I know we’ll be okay.”
They loved like the ship was sinking. To the backing of a string quartet, it was quick, unrestrained, consuming, hand on hand and hand on thigh and hand on the foggy windows of the same Prius Rose whizzed past other cars now. Weaving through lanes with the thread of her despair. Leaving the speed limit behind. The same Prius she’d bought from the widow of a veteran who asphyxiated himself in the back seats. The same Prius that “ran, certainly,” that “ran right to the end.”
Racing now, Rose refused to let go:
“There’s nothing to find out there.” // “I’ll see.” // “You’ll come back even more lost.” // “Alright.” // “It’s a town for retired raisins.” // “But they’re at peace.” // “Their children feed them soup with spoons.” // He’s laughing now // “I’m serious.” // “I know.” // “Please.” // “I’m sorry.” // Raising her voice, “And who will feed you?” // Meeting her there, “My hands work fine!” // She’s laughing too, because he’s not ready for independence, because his naivety made him charming, even when it hurt.
There’s a faint mark on her thigh where his hand was. A mark that will succeed him. He’s using his palms to wipe his eyes. The retinas were “weak, that’s all. Prone to watering in the wind.” He’s thinking about the fields they lay between last night. How the sunflowers turned down to face them. He’d said he’d never seen that before, that until then sunflowers were children’s books and Etsy paintings, that Johannesburg was no real place, if this was the world, Johannesburg was a cheap tribute to it, where sunflowers were left to be seeds.
So it’s silence. It’s an hour on the highway, an offramp, back amongst the city’s smells. It’s broken sewers, and street corner cookouts, and complaints about them both. It’s Jack putting Moonriver on to say I’d ask you to come, but I figure you’d say yes. It’s Rose turning Moonriver up to say I know. It’s house-of-cards homes and shit-talking commuters and traffic on the last stretch through the city that raised them. It’s a botched parking job that won’t be fixed. It’s Jack and Rose, Rose and Jack, and it had to happen this way.