Collision

Let’s not read into it, but I got into my first and only car crash the same day I tried to move to the city where you live. I sat numb in the left lane with a bruise across my breastbone, holding up traffic, hood smoking on the hot tarmac until the tow truck came to haul me back home. I’d joked ever since the layoffs that I’d live with my parents forever, but it felt darkly true as I climbed out of the truck cab onto their driveway at the exact hour I’d expected to arrive at the new apartment.

The car had been twenty-four years old, like me, and then she was dead, instead of me. I’d grown up strapped into a booster seat in that car, watching my mom’s long fingers tap the steering wheel to the beat of the windshield wipers. I’d learned to drive in those low-slung seats, memorizing the sounds of the engine straining to pump the air conditioner and crest a hill at the same time. I’d had my first kiss in the driver’s seat, slamming my knees on the underside of the dashboard as I tried to shift closer to the loser I was kissing, unsure how to arrange my limbs.

During the year at home, the car was my company when I needed to cry in the driveway before coming inside, or when I stopped to load up with fresh summer corn from my dad’s favorite farmstand, or when you were free and I drove to pick you up, feeling like hot molten metal before your hands were on me, making me solid. We kissed in the front seat until I flipped the armrests up to twine my fingers fully through you, no more graceful than I had been during that first kiss years ago, but so much more sure.

The day after the crash, I walked to the auto shop where the car was waiting and stripped her bare: pulled my parents’ old atlases from the seat pouches, pens and pennies from the cupholders. The CD you burned for me had been caught in the car’s throat when she died. I knew it was a lost cause, but tried anyway—and with the key half-turned in the ignition, the green radio light sputtered on just long enough for the CD player to spit out the disc, an iridescent moon under my smudgy fingers. I laughed aloud in the dark. Where would I listen to it now?

But let’s not read into it; let’s not say the collision was a sign. You and I agreed from the beginning: no signs, no guesswork, no confusion. We didn’t mean to kiss the first time, not really. But the moment my fingers met your jawline—and I almost thought it was a joke, me touching your face, you turning towards me—the rest of my body knew where it wanted to be. So we decided that we would stay friends and be careful with the rest of it.

You were looking at me, head leaning on the passenger-side window. “You definitely have something to say.”

I watched the streetlight shadows shake leaf patterns over your skin. “Do you think we can do this?” I asked. “You’ve slept with more of your friends than I have, but still.”

“I don’t know,” you admitted. “But I’ve never started out so intentionally, or with someone I trusted so much. I think because we know how to talk about it, we’ll know how to do it.”

It was a theory we tested like a bridge, both of our weights suspended over open space. We talked our way through every transition, stomping out ambiguity with the heavy feet of ritual communication. We instituted an obligatory check-in, a precondition for every time we saw each other, every walk or drive or lunch no matter where we were or how short our time. What are you thinking about this, do you want to be physical today, what would you like to do, are we still feeling like being friends who kiss? We always were, but it felt like we had found a shortcut to safety by double-checking.

Given that we were staying friends and not telling anyone about the rest of it and fucking each other with our eyes locked—given that we had grown up together without really meeting until this year—given that you cried in my bed until I shook with your sobs—given that we had stood naked together in front of the mirror until we laughed at our bodies, how they turned abstract under scrutiny—given that we were staying friends—we knew we needed to be careful. I never said “I love you,” just “Love you.” A seat belt of thin air.

The day we met in town for Christmas shopping, I locked my keys in the car and you had to drive me all the way home so I could snatch the spare from the ceramic jar above the microwave. “I’m so sorry,” I kept saying. “Will the bookstore still be open? You need something for your mom, right? I’m so sorry.”

You put a soft hand on a different part of my body every time I apologized: knee, wrist, shoulder, hair, lips. “You really hate making mistakes, don’t you? I didn’t leave the house to go shopping, bud. I came to hang out with you.”

I pressed a kiss to your palm. “I just feel stupid for wasting all this time.”

“Want me to feel stupid, too?” You grinned. “I could give you an overshare.”

“Go for it.”

You only had to think for a second. “I have to journal after every time we have sex.”

“What?” I dropped your hand, already laughing.

“It’s so good. There’s so much to process.”

“Are you making fun of me because I—”

“Because you what?”

“I do, too!”

You were bent over the wheel with laughter. “I knew it! I knew it wasn’t just me!”

“Then that’s a roast, not an overshare.”

We shook each other loose with our honesty. Sometimes, you looked almost afraid to touch me, so gentle as we moved our bodies in close. “I don’t want to lose the tentativeness,” you said. “I want to keep that—that—you know what I mean?”

“It feels like we’re always on the edge of something,” I agreed.

You relaxed against me in recognition. “Exactly.”

I pulled tangles from your hair for a moment before asking, “Do you want to write that in your journal now?” Your teeth brushed shivers down my neck as you laughed.

The weekend your parents went away and I could stay over, the light arrived too soon in the mornings, dawning pale on your eggshell sheets and the black cat between us. We made so much quiet together in those white winter rooms: your long torso next to mine, your gasps, your fingers whisking eggs with a fork, the slant of your hips leaning on the counter. So much silence—and so much music: me turning sonatinas over on the piano downstairs, you coaxing polkas from the bass upstairs and shouting down to me, “How often have you heard two different instruments in two different rooms at the same time?” and me yelling back, “Can’t hear you, I’m trying to practice!”, you burning me the CD from your dad’s old computer, me singing bad harmonies to motown songs while the pasta water came to a boil. The pale mornings and the stretch of your body—it felt like something was perfect, like something was missing.

We wrapped every moment, every kiss, every point of contact in conversation so there would be no misunderstanding and no hurt. It was work, all my hours filled with the words we’d said and the words we’d say next time, the constant buzz of more, soon. No peace but so much joy.

Then the rehiring started and you moved back to your city.

When you were home, time bent to you, punctuated only by your presence, for nothing else kept the days from collapsing into each other. An either-or, a switch flipped: you are here with me or you are not.

When you were home, time bent to you, punctuated only by your presence, for nothing else kept the days from collapsing into each other. An either-or, a switch flipped: you are here with me or you are not.

When you moved, the after-time began, the counting time when each hour was x hours from when we last touched. Thursday was only proof of a certain number of Thursdays since then. I counted them over and over, stuck in the stupefying numerical bluntness of the calendar.

No more buzz, no more promise of more, soon. From the new quiet came a vague, foggy change: I began to marvel at how I no longer lived on your time, didn’t measure all things against your absence or absorb the world in your increments. But I noticed, again and again, that you were no longer my metronome. And of course in this way you still were.

By the time I got the new job offer, the ticking had faded. I was almost too busy shoving my bedroom into boxes, time pressed up tight against my move-in day and the start of a new lease, to wonder what it would be like to see you again. I didn’t drive around feeling like liquid metal anymore, or run our conversations across my tongue to taste them over and over. The obligatory check-ins had faded with our phone calls; we discussed our grocery lists and acne as often as our emotional geography, and when I laughed, “I think we’ve gotten to the point that we’re boring each other,” you said, “That’s one way to say we’ve gotten close.”

“Speaking of,” I began before I could stop myself. “After I move, I think we should be friends without kissing.”

You paused for just long enough that I felt a flutter kick in my chest.

“That sounds good,” you said, and the flutter faltered.

“There’s so much I’ll miss,” I went on. “But I think it will be—not better—it couldn’t have been better—but more right.”

“I know what you mean,” you replied.

“So you’re good with that?”

“I am, and I’m impressed with us,” you laughed. “We’ve kept our promise: talking through everything, staying honest so no one’s hurt.”

It was almost true; it only stung a little.

Now, as I ride the bus downtown to meet you I feel, finally, fully, how much more difficult it will be when we hug hello for the first time in months and your embrace reminds me of the purple crescents you used to leave all over my body, how I savored those moons, glowing with your touch. More difficult when I roll my fingers over the new studs in your ears and tell you how pretty you are. Even a declawed reunion will bring back all the ways we used to sink our teeth into one another.

Let’s not read into it—we’ve talked through everything, you know how I want it to be and I know how you want it to be but somehow it isn’t what I thought it would be. I can’t stop remembering how the music you made me coughed and crackled and died on the hot highway as the back of the car in front of me suddenly folded through the windshield. Once the dreams began, they were endless: over and over I smash into the car ahead, over and over I ram the brake but the rear license plate just grows, ballooning neon numbers and letters to fill my vision as I strain the pedal to the floor, far from the next car but then close and then far too close, and we meet in acrid, crumpling collision, hot smush of metal on metal. I am asking you, what do you feel like doing today? Is this what you want? Does it bother you that I call you pal when you know what the inside of my body feels like? Are we still having fun? Me? Yes, yes, all good on my end, I like how things are, yes, keep kissing me please, I am going just under the speed limit, following traffic, we aren’t going too fast, are we? We’re being so careful, right? And then the dream skips like a CD and all we do is slam slam slam into the car in front of me, I thought I was paying such close attention, I thought I was saying everything out loud but now the car is crushed with your music choked in her machinery and I know how she feels with you stuck inside of her.

When I get off the bus, you are waiting across the street with your sweet smile. I look both ways once, twice, again, again before I step from the curb and towards you into traffic.