Tethered

One || Dirt Roads

{Letters to Ghosts - Lucie Silvas}

...Left were the ashes, 'cause I let it burn, they're with my cold heart, buried in the dirt, his loss is the only thing that still hurts...

----

Loud. So loud. 

Through neon lights and a pounding bass line, the very foundations on which I walk are unsteady. Hands wander over drunken skin while music vibrates off the walls. Smoke and powder cover every sight and surface as droopy-eyed, slack-jawed comrades thrive on through the night. Eyes roam over me while I clamber through the waves of people, feeling the gentle grip of his hands in mine, pulling me through each dizzying motion, a shield against the sea of sweat and booze. 

His hands, white-knuckled in silent desperation for an empty space, are the only tangible thing I can focus on. Like being underwater, we enter into the quiet. The click of a door mutes the party, separating us into a soundproof bubble, the party still part of us but we are no longer part of it.

Blurry, faded edges. 

Numbness stings my body like ice water and yet his breath on my neck is a sensation that lingers, sinking in all too deeply. The gentle touch tightens around me, yet I struggle to move, the emptiness of this foreign bedroom leaving my faltering footsteps like intruder's prints. 

The shield his body had once been now stands like a force field that I cannot pass through, yet with no power behind these intoxicated bones, that force is what keeps me still standing. His face had been a part of that wave he had saved me from in what feels like a moment before. Something had shimmered beneath his eyes, something not quite crystal and definitely not clear, yet I held my hands out, clutching at him. Or had he held out for me?

His moves are slow. Calculated. Aware of this room and its contents. His brain whirrs as I feel his swift and precise motions colliding with my unsure slurs. I know what I want to say, yet he doesn't know what I mean. Does he? With a falling step forward, his arms catch me, carrying me over to a bed, where the mattress holds me.

Envelopes me. Drowns me. Suffocates me. Silences me.

I gasp.

----

    A bead of sweat runs down my neck as I open my eyes, wide and frantic, before slumping back into the itchy fabric of the seat, suddenly aware of where I am. On a God-forsaken bus, headed to the middle of nowhere -- soon to be population: Me. 

    I wipe the sweat off of my neck, my body feeling sticky and uncomfortable as I attempt to stretch my aching back. I am just happy to be awake again, aware of myself and in control. Sleeping has become an impending dread in my life, the paralysis of reliving what I'd rather leave buried until I gasp myself awake again. 

     This half-empty bus is filled with nothing but poker-faced strangers who look as excited about reaching their appointed destination as I am. A couple of lonely adults, a mom and her child, and even a little old man who sits staring out the window at the front of the bus. We're all on our own journeys, leaving something behind, headed to this nowhere town to become no-one special. Specks of dust,  wiped off and forgotten. 

    I had watched as the world outside the large glass window morphed from the concrete and streetlights of the city, over state lines and into the rolling hills and endless fields of the dirt road counties I was headed into the heart of. Since waking, nothing much had changed, the window showcasing an expanse of fields, and small-town signs we would pass in and out of, never being the right one. Even when we get to the right stop, I know it won't feel 'right'.