More writing

I probably should have walked away and called an Uber or a Lyft or your friendly local Santa Barbara serial killer to transport me to the train station. Heck, I could have even walked. It would have been a long trek, but still. The worst idea was getting in Matt’s car and so that’s exactly what I’ve chosen.

For a long few moments he’s silent and it’s awful. He very deliberately concentrates on all the smallest movements: shifting into Reverse, glancing in the rear-view, backing, then switching into Drive and moving carefully, hand over hand, into a turn out of the parking lot. He frowns as he focuses on the road. The way his mouth moves tells me he’s biting his tongue, a bad habit I know he’s been trying to ditch. When he’s stressed he’ll bite it until he bleeds and then complain about how bad the blood tastes. There’s some symbolism there, but I’m not really interested in investigating it right now.

For my part, I pass the time by pretending interest in the smallest details of his car, the ones I noticed and memorized months ago: the crack in the dashboard that keeps spreading like some heinous spider who’d just crawled away from a nuclear assault; the floor mats so flat on the floor, looking like the entire world has stepped upon them with a heavy foot; the windows that are always, no matter what the weather, rolled down. Matt’s not the kind to ask whether his passengers would like them open. He just assumes that what he wants is what the world needs.

When he speaks, it sounds like he’s talking to someone so far out of his reach that he can’t possibly communicate with them in regular English. Whether that means I’m above or below him almost doesn’t matter. The point is that he and I are two people on completely different levels, that whatever thread once connected us is twisted and frayed to the point where it will just have to be cut. There seems to be no other choice.