Unhinged

3

Maurya

You can't get more unassuming than Oklahoma without going somewhere that's nowhere, those states that you're not sure really exist. Like Kansas, or...Arkansas or...Maine. Who's ever really been to Maine? No one that's who, and certainly not me. You don't go to those places. You're either born there or not, and I was fortunate in that regard.

If you can consider North Carolina fortunate. I'm not quite sure about the verdict yet. I'd like to go to a midsize town. Not small enough everyone knows their neighbors well.

Mr. Jenkins didn't show up to lunch.

I don't want that small-town intimacy. I'd like to go to a town just large enough to be aloof to your neighbors with a hi, and a bye, and oh, I guess they moved.

Quiet as it's kept, no one really cares unless they have to. Unless they look like bad people for not pretending they give a fuck.

The man beside me has a rustic charm, his shaggy hair, and his scruffy beard. I wasn't expecting much, of course, maybe some fraught small talk. He smiles and says nonsensical things while trying it to stare openly at my cleavage. I somewhat appreciate the gesture. Oliver shifts nervously beside me. His palms have started sweating. It's a two-day ride to Oklahoma, and he's already nervous.

He's got something about him. Something about him makes me not wanna stick a fork in his eyes, which is rare for me. Especially with a man. He's decided to leave me alone, concentrating instead on the blurring scenery. I take the silence to think. I wonder when they will find father. I doubt anyone will.

No one loves, no one cares. Maybe someone stumbles upon him, eventually, but he's so far from everyone in that trailer, that not even the smell of his rotting corpse will draw anyone.

He'll get to die, alone, unnoticed forgotten. Rotting like I rotted in that hellhole. An apt end to such a miserable existence. We weren't always like this, making pacts of death, and praying the other would just go away, no matter the consequences.

You know how when you're born you kinda just exist and then one day when you're two or three, and you're sitting on your couch, with that springs sticking into your back and you just suddenly realize—I'm alive.

I had that moment when I was 5. For one brief year, everything was okay. And maybe it's only because I just realized I existed? And when I was five I didn't know what squalor meant but somehow, I knew I lived in it. Maybe it was okay because I wasn't there. I often think I'd like to go back to the past.

People say that's impossible, but it's really not. You can live in the past if you want, it's easy. It's just that no one else is there. They've all moved on with you, and you can wander around the empty ghost halls of your memories trying to recreate it, but even you've forgotten. If you ever really knew.

You never really knew.

The memory is a shoddy thing, like a broken camcorder lens, the picture just isn't quite...right. Something is amiss and if all you ever look through is slightly hazy eyes, well, you'd just assume the world was fuzzy.

So I don't bother staying alone in the past. I'd rather live my anger in the present where others can suffer with me.

Oliver has cast another glance at me. He's almost like a puppy, stealing longing glances at the stranger next to him, begging for something he can't verbalize.

It's cute and kinda pitiful, his sandy brow hair and green eyes. Like a kicked puppy.

So I offer him a little treat. Some conversation.

"What do you do for fun?" I ask.

He looks around for a moment, like he doesn't he know, somehow, and then visibly settles on an answer.

"I...game. Sometimes. Occasionally."

He's not a very good liar. I like that in a man. It is inevitable, after all, that a man will be a liar. That much is fact. But a bad liar is easier to deal with.

"Oh yeah? PC? Console?"

He frowns. "P-PC. Yeah. Yeah, I have...3 computers back home."

I nod and let him have this little lie, smiling. He doesn't know I'm laughing at him and not with him, which is even funnier, so I laugh harder. He doesn't understand why I'm so amused, but laughs as well, so as not to seem rude.

We're both uproariously laughing, me at his pathetic attempt at lying and him not look like an idiot, which he's failing at.

We keep doing that until someone from the back grumbles a not so soft shut the fuck up.

Our laughter dissolves into giggles as we look at one another and for the first time, I've truly enjoyed my freedom.