The curtains were a thick purple velvet, so as her eyes fluttered open, she had no way of knowing what time it was. She forgot where she was, but the smell reminded her. The room had an odd smell to it, like old sweat, like the basement of some run down rural church. An echo in the silence.
He was still sleeping silently, so silently that she also forgot he was there until she felt skin, so silently that she thought to herself, should I check his pulse?? Hesitantly, she reached out in the darkness and tried to find the artery in his neck. It took a few light touches to find, and when she did, he startled awake. “You scared me.” Then he settled under her touch, both of their eyes adjusting, finding a sliver of diffuse light–just enough for his eyes to find hers as he tightened her grip around his neck. '
“I could kill you right now,” she said playfully. He paused.
He traced his hand from her hand to her elbow, then up her arm, thinking about the delicacy of her hands. You could not, he thought to himself. But instead he grabbed her neck and said, “not if I kill you first.” Her grip tightened, then his. Slow pressure building in their forearms, eyes firmly locked together in the naked darkness. They held that way for a moment, each refusing to yield, until he suddenly pulled her toward him by her wrists, bringing her into a kiss. “You’re too pussy to kill me,” she giggled.
“Believe it or not, I just prefer the world with you in it.”
She smiled. It faded. She crinkled her nose.
“Does this room smell weird to you?”
“There was mold in here, I bet, that they did a shit job at cleaning up.” Men love confidently declaring bullshit theories.
It was a foreign room, the third new room on their week-long adrenaline bender, rocketing across state lines in the night, seeking conflict and adventure in that peculiar way young adults try to grope at some childhood fantasies of living like highwaymen.
“All motels have had mold that was poorly cleaned. That’s such a boring theory. I want this story to be different.”
“What if it’s not?”
“What if it is.”
“It’s usually not.”
“We can still imagine that it is.”
She always said things like this.
A week prior, a rich friend had ditched town for some post-breakup European sabbatical, and had asked the two to watch the apartment. They spent a night there, found the keys to a jaguar, then set off in the morning to “cure their boredom somewhere in the middle of the country”.
“What if we were Bonnie and Clyde,” she asked, “but we weren’t criminals?”
“Then we wouldn’t be Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what Bonnie and Clyde were.”
“There is so much more to people than the thing people tend to know them for,” she replied. “I think you’re being unfair”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
His response made her sad. She thought about how Bonnie and Clyde were reduced to what they were and how he could not really fathom that the core of what makes people people is not what they were. She wondered what he thought she was, and if she wasn’t that particular thing, he would think that she was no longer her.
No, he didn’t know what she meant by that. He also didn’t know she used to live in Iowa. In fact, he didn’t know much about her at all. He didn’t allow himself to know her, really. She was a mere idealization that he visited when he wanted to feel like he wasn’t in his life. He hated his life–no, not his life. He hated himself, and he resented his life when it felt good because he thought he didn’t deserve it. That’s why he kept her a degree of separation from his life. “I love you,” he would say, which was true, but it was love that existed in a different reality. If he had known her at all, he would know that what seemed like a spur of the moment adventure was a carefully calculated trip from New York to Iowa so that she could kill herself in front of her mother.
Something else he didn’t know about her is that she never met her parents, so by mother she meant her step mother who would adorn her body with cigarette burns, and ignore her screams when men she brought home would take his turn with her, too. Nobody in New York City would have known. She was quite bubbly, and very well liked–a social butterfly–but there was a darkness in her that not many people saw, let alone understood. In fact, the darkness was often mistaken as an opaqueness, because the odd combination of vivaciousness and melancholy short circuited the brain. She wanted to kill herself in front of her mother, but also somebody who cared about her. That way she would finally be understood.
She didn’t really know him, either. It was funny–they were so caught up in a whirlwind of passion that they didn’t really talk much. They played each other their favorite songs, talked about movies, wrote stories, and could stare into eachothers eyes for a long time without even blinking. It was pure bliss–they only felt bliss when they were together, so they forgot to get to know each other, really. If she knew him, she would know that what seemed like a spur of the moment adventure was a carefully calculated trip from New York to Nashville so that he could kill the man who he watched molest his mother when he was a child. He was just elected governor of Tennessee. He recognized him when he saw a post on social media.
So here we have two people who feel very lonely, even when together. They feel a passionate bond, but they still don’t feel seen by one another. It’s quite sad. They didn’t see, nor did they let themselves be seen, because they were protecting themselves. They are both too prideful to be okay with finding safety in an other.
This dark purple velvet curtained rural church basement smelling motel room was somewhere outside of Indianapolis.
“Where to now?”
“Let’s keep heading west,” she replied, looking at a map, eyeing Iowa.
He leaned over her shoulder.
“Really? I was thinking maybe we should head a bit south. We can go to Nashville. See some live music.”
“I really wanted to head west.”
“Please? Can we go to Nashville? I’ve always wanted to…”
“I want to keep going west. You don’t understand. This means a lot to me.”
“Well, Nashville means a lot to me.”
The conversation continued like this for quite some time, until they were yelling at each other, and being quite cruel. You see, there are two ways this story could have ended. They could have confessed their intentions, and embraced each other with both body and soul, finally feeling real, seen, understood—all the things they never felt with each other, or anyone, really. At best it would have been a happy ending, at worst, a suicide pact. But what happened instead is worse than even a suicide pact. They both died alone.
“Fine, “she yelled, “go to Nashville, enjoy your stupid fucking music. I’ll hitchhike west. I don’t need you in my life.” He stormed off in a rage. She took the remainder of her practically-full bottle of medication as the engine barely even started. What was the point of killing herself in front of her mother if nobody would be around to finally understand her? She gave up on understanding. She was tired of trying to be understood. She wanted to go to sleep, and to sleep she went. He didn’t look back. She was dead well before he crossed state borders. He made his way to Nashville with a gun, and he tried to kill the governor, but he was killed by security in the process. When the friend returned to her New York apartment, she was really pissed off that her friends stole the Jaguar.