Train Smoke.

When we saw it later, what was once a car, we both felt sick in a new way. The passenger side was crumpled in a perfectly defined V shape, right up and into the windshield. The fence stopped powering into us at exactly the right moment, it seems. My bruised chest, airbag burned face and broken glasses suddenly didn’t seem so bad. I crouched down and rubbed my palms over my thighs, partly collecting myself and partly thanking them for still being there.

“I could have killed you,” he offered up out of the thick fog of silence. He was crying. I had never seen that before.

I stood up.

“But you didn’t. So, ya know. Don’t worry about it.”

I lit a cigarette and handed it to him. I tucked some hair behind his ears and softly squeezed his earlobe. It wasn’t romantic because D didn’t like girls, but we still found solace in platonic affection. The first night I rolled, and melted into his ashy carpet while Party Monster played in the background, D and his boyfriend dog-piled on top of me (and a mountain of pillows) for what felt like hours. I remember thinking I had never felt more comfortable and I had never felt more loved…and aren’t those sort of the same thing?

“Yeah well, I could have. And I will never forgive myself for that,” he said, between a slow and hyphenated drag. Exhaling into the cold, I couldn’t tell if it was really smoke or just the silhouette of empty breath wrapped in frost.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “At least not entirely. I was there too. I was doing the same goddamned thing and I’m the one who turned up the music.”

I can’t remember now if it was Tear You Apart or Someday that was blasting as we missed the stop sign and, subsequently, our turn, but I think of the smoke and glass and the screaming metal and my empty, hollow stomach in my ribs every time I hear either one. I think of the tow truck drivers we flipped off and called vultures in a parking lot and I think of the looks on their faces when we saw them again, an hour later, tugging at the carcass of D’s pretty Volvo.

That crash was the beginning of the end of life as we knew it. The crash became easier to laugh about as time went on, through awkward memories and glassy eyes and clenched jaws, but we all knew that the crash changed everything. I’m not sure why, or how, but in that moment, there beside the wreckage, I was sure that I would always, always know when.

***

Before the crash, D’s plan was to move to Austin with his boyfriend. That plan didn’t exactly change, except that now he was moving with no car. That meant the trips were on me. I guess I’ve never minded being needed. In a sick sort of way, I kind of crave it. And at least I usually had M to keep me company for the nighttime drives. We were technically exes turned best friends. I met him a few nights after a party at an abandoned trailer park, with Crystal Castles blaring through some faceless DJs speakers, where a giant man named Hollywood gave me a huge sack of weed.

“I don’t even smoke weed,” I said. “Got any coke?”

He gave me some of that too, but it was gone before sunrise.

The night was wet with mediocrity and bad decisions, but I still remember thinking I wanted to live forever if living could just always feel like this.

Days later, a fat bag of herb was sitting in my room and I had no idea what to do with it. I had never touched rolling papers in my life. So on my way home from work, I stopped at a tattoo shop that I had seen pipes at once. My legs were heavy, my soul felt the same. I was in between party weekends and everything was closing in on me: my sternum was shrinking, my insanity escaping into the realm of reality.

There was this 20 something kid laid out on a table, getting a tattoo of a peace sign. Not the symbol — a tattoo of an actual hand making the peace sign. He looked at me and I shook a bit, said something stupid that I can’t remember now. His eyes looked like some patented color I’d never seen. His hair looked like the kind my fingers could get lost in. But his smile is what got me. It was crooked and honest, a gap in the front, maybe a chip lost somewhere in the midst of it all. I bought a small pink pipe because I thought it was cute and inconspicuous: everything I’d ever hoped to be. I told the guy who worked there that I thought the peace sign guy was handsome. I slid a piece of paper to him with my number on it, and some pitiful “I’m interested — unless you’re not” note, and since rejection isn’t a suit that I wear well, I asked him to wait until I left to pass it along.

I walked out to my car, sparked the engine, and put on something by Matt and Kim. I rolled my window down and grabbed a red. The shop owner ran out — literally ran. He caught my window and told me that he gave the guy my note right away, and that he thought I was cute too. I’m still not sure why he felt the need to rush out and tell me this other than that undying human desire to feel like part of something, but I thanked him for his service and kissed him on the cheek, while slipping him a small handful of cash because tips make the world go round, I guess. No sooner had I left the parking lot than my moms old flip phone (that I was allowed to borrow in the evenings and on the weekends, when minutes were free) lit up. Something like, “Thanks for the note. I like your style, dude.” We talked a bit about why he shouldn’t refer to women as dude, but internally I actually found it strangely endearing. And the next night we went to Denny’s because it was the only place left in Cypress where you could smoke inside. We drank eight thousand coffees and smoked two thousand cigarettes and talked until 6 in the morning on the curb outside the front door. All the while I was echoing the sentiment, “I think I like you but I never date anyone younger than me.”

It didn’t take long for him to change my mind.
And it didn’t take long for me to ruin his life.

On our second date, I told him I was an addict. I’ve never been one to conceal my dark corners: I’m not in the business of tricking anyone. He told me he was into ketamine and what’s the difference really? Three months later I learned that he lied about those k holes. I guess I’ve never been the best at deciphering fact from fiction.
But what’s done is done, and for the next year we lived in a semi conscious state of total bliss.

I played “Hey Jude” one night through the speakers in my family room while my parents were away. He loved The Beatles only slightly less than he loved Dylan. On my way back outside with drinks, I saw him through the window, smiling, and singing to himself. So I sang back and he smiled more. A year later, when we were nothing more than friends who used to fuck, he told me, “That night? You singing me ‘Hey Jude’ through the window…that changed my whole life.”

For a moment I felt calm. I felt cuteness and innocence and quirk.

And then there was the crash. And then we started our long and frequent rides to Austin. And then we got scared. And then we switched providers. And then, someone died. And then there was a close call, and eventually, another. And on and on. Until I woke up in a state of literal sepsis and shock and realized we weren’t invincible.
Until I suddenly (and secretly) cared about such things as life and death.

***

There was a brief period, after D’s boyfriend stabbed him with a box cutter and moved to L.A. and D got forty something stitches before joining Greenpeace and heading toward Colorado; before M and I found suboxone on the street and started trying to get clean for the first time, when I could see my reflection in the water instead of a thousand ripples. Things felt peaceful, present, and possible.

We still had to entertain ourselves, no matter the season or state of delayed decay. M and I would drive down to this foot bridge over an old rail yard. He told me how fascinated he had always been by trains. I told him how I’d always wanted to grab hold of one and never look back. The air was pulsing; I could feel the flap of pigeons wings between the stars.

“I’ve always wanted to climb down there,” he said.

“Well why don’t we then?”

“I’m on probation. I can’t get in trouble.”

I laughed. “There is literally no one around. Let’s go.” I started to climb down and my foot slipped on a rock, sending a cacophony of pebbles echoing down onto the forgotten hunks of metal.

“What the hell,” he said. “Stop. Come here!”

“I won’t,” I shouted. We had listened to Dark Blue by Jack’s Mannequin on repeat during the drive over. I started singing, “When I’m here with you, the world could be burning, burning down!”

He smiled just so, annoyed but intrigued. He stood up and began his descent through the wet Houston air.

Once we reached the bottom he grabbed my hand. “Now what?”

“I didn’t think that far ahead,” I said.

He pulled me toward him, and pulled himself toward the back of a rusted out train car. He gestured for me to go first, pushing my butt up from behind.

“Hey now,” I laughed. “We’re just friends these days, remember?”

His face dropped. “We will never be just friends.”

I blinked slowly. I knew exactly what he meant.

I pulled a cigarette from my purse. He pulled a joint from his pocket and lit it just for me.

“The moon looks nice,” I said.

He didn’t bother entertaining my small talk.

“What do you think made us this way?” he asked.

“What way?” I countered.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Just… this way. Unable to hold onto something. Unable to just let it be, where it is, how it is, whatever it is.”

A gust of wind came bursting down the tracks. The hair on my neck stood up. I pushed my arm into his side, my hand into his pocket.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone told me once…’We accept the love we think we deserve.’ Maybe it’s something like that.”

He rubbed his palm across my shoulder, looked up, and closed his eyes — a smile half creeping, half bleeding across his face.

“No,” he said. “That’s all wrong. We accept the love we think we can handle.”

The moment the words entered the space between us, a light at the corner of the rail yard flickered on and off and on again and footsteps billowed toward us. He jumped down, grabbed me by the waist and hoisted me down toward the ground. We clambered up the slope and ran full speed to the parked car; sweating, laughing, and filled with twenty-something terror. We slammed the gas, rocks flying behind the tires, and drove for ten or fifteen minutes without saying a word. When we finally came to a stop, we still said nothing and let our bodies breathe together. Somewhere in the midst of the music and the ticking of an invisible clock and our hands everywhere we swore they’d never be again, I sighed into an open ear, “I love you.”

He knew that I meant it, but also that there was nothing he could do about it…not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow.

“I can handle it,” he said.

I smiled, I pushed into him. I put my hand around his throat. I pulled him into me.

“I’ll always think you’re sweet for trying.”
He twisted, he shook, he fell around me.

“At least we’ll always have the trying. The trying, and the train tracks.”

***

We didn’t always have the trying or the train tracks, though. We never really “always” have anything, do we? The town seemed to empty, one by one, of everyone but us. Whether through death, or sobriety, or hitching rides to mountain towns. And eventually, I left too. I left M, and his crooked smile. I still see it sometimes, perfectly, yet I haven’t seen it now in almost ten years. I wrote him a letter, though, that I’m not sure he ever read. That’s probably because I never sent it. I just typed it out, and stuck it onto the end of some shaky, mediocre story, and called it an ending. Or a segue… a segue to a book of shoddy poems, or a novel about everywhere we’ve been without ever leaving our front yards. An open letter to an old friend, that signified both the beginning, and the end.

***

“M,
I just…left you there. Choking on the blood and the tar. I said that I’d come back for you but never did. I just took off running like a battered beast into the night, to save myself. I wear this regret like a scarlet letter across the bosom of my own health. I will always carry it across my shoulders like second hand fur, something to feel righteous and ashamed of. I will always hold it like a wound dressed in stolen velvet. I will always still see you in my minds eye, clasping at the edges of something so wide open. I will see you in the background, eyes closed, smiling, and waving my hand away. I will always still feel you…in music and in movies and in other peoples laughter. In everybody’s sighs and secrets.
And I will always say I’m sorry…through heavy, shadowed whispers that barely make a sound.”