Gone Was Any Trace Of You

Trigger Warning: Aspirin and alcohol Abuse, Drunk Driving, Grief, Implied Loss of Life and Mentions of Hospitals

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He had never driven before today.

But he was resting one hand on the shift lever, rubbing his palm over the oddly sticky top, and had the other hand digging into the steering wheel, feeling the faux leather of the wheel cover sear into his hands and starting to feel like a rug burn. The gas pedal was pressed all the way to the floor, and he couldn’t be bothered to cast a pale blue eye down at the speedometer to check his speed. Blonde hair swirled around in his face, in front of his eyes, looking shiny and greasy and long as it scratched the nape of his neck. All he knew was that it was a black back road, lined only by trees, and, peeking over the treeline, the streetlights on the elevated highway in the distance looked like a flickering beam from a UFO as the rain came down. The sky became an abyss, and darkness turned the trees into a comic book blur. He drove like the reaper going to collect his next soul.

The lightning cracked, and in the light, for just a moment, he saw a flicker of him. He stood in the kitchen, flour coating his hands. Honey-hued eyes regarded him with warmth. He wished that he could see the body— there was a saying, yes? About letting the dog see the corpse so that it didn’t wait by the door forever?-- He wanted to see the body. Someone put the puzzle piece in wrong, upside down and backwards, so the image remained broken apart and askew. If he could see the body, he could believe that it was real, and the entire thing would stop being unreal in his mind.

Another strike of lightning, and the rain started to come down harder, landing like bullets on top of the car. The car felt like a tin can; a piece of aluminum foil tapped and crinkled under the slightest pressure. The lightning was like looking up into the LED’s of the hospital room, praying to a God you don’t believe in that if you stared into the swirling white for long enough, maybe you could delude yourself into thinking that you might see the light of heaven. A glimpse in the photo reel of a man tucking a strand of blonde behind his ear and his fingers lingering there for a few seconds too long, a palm pressing against his cheeks. A searing hot brand. 

He kept breathing through his mouth, taking in deep, heaving breaths, so the inside was prickly and dry. The car was screeching in a steady whiiiiiirrrrrrrrrr from underneath his feet, and with every bump in the road he could hear the car hit the pavement, a sound between a grind and a thump barely registering in his ears; the entire car trembling. It was like the grind of a garbage disposal as rot started to circle the drain.

When he found out, it felt like a blanket that was being wrapped around his shoulders, a disgusting comfort. He didn’t cry or scream. He didn’t feel like he was hit with a thousand bricks. He only thought, of course, that makes sense, and let out a shuddering exhale. People often described their hearts as feeling heavy, like a sack that had too much water that was going to start seeping through the oiled sides. But his heart felt like it burned, an itch on his palms and his fingers before escalating into a nerve-hot fire and turning his skin white. He could feel something knot in his stomach, grabbing the soft pink insides and twisting. This fear that this man that he kept so close to his acid-filled heart was going to burn and turn into nothing but a flickering silhouette; an eyeless creature that could only be viewed through static, a thing that he might recognize if he squinted his eyes enough. He desperately needed this man to burn into his memory like a haunt, grab at his eyes and dig his claws under his skin so that all he could see was him; needed him to become an afterimage when the lights in the room turned off.

Another crash of lightning, this time with the thunder roaring in his ears so loud that it made his ears ring for a moment. A man kissing the other goodbye. He tasted like early morning coffee; the blonde knew he tasted like whiskey. His lips were soft and smooth like a silken blanket.

It was never supposed to end this way.

He argued with the silk-touched man before he died. Stood over his hospital bed like an angel of death and went back and forth about the hospital and the car and the assets. One was ever pragmatic, and the other just wanted someone’s hand to hold him as he withered; a blue rose wilting and starting to be crushed by the pressure of gravity. The flames of anguish started to dance on his tongue, and he was grateful, through the fog of guilt, that it didn’t spill out.

He waited until after he left to die.

He couldn’t be considerate enough to wait until after he had a chance to say “I love you.”

It was never supposed to end this way.

He didn’t ease his foot off the gas even a little, and continued hurtling towards the darkness. There was nothing and no one on the road, just pale and broken white lines, and the company of trees that were whipping around in the wind. There wasn’t a single bug curled up and twitching on his windshield; there was just him, the rain, and the lightning strikes. With every flashback through the film reel, he closed his eyes tighter, and then would let them fly open. And he was a few seconds into the future. A few seconds past everything else.

He told his friends, and they offered quiet sympathies, but that was also the moment that the stopwatch clicked and started to tick. They moved on with their lives, their jobs, their frustrations, and left him clinging to the lifeboat, clinging on for dear life. He was expected to pull himself out, peel his limbs out of the raging currents, but his fingers were slipping, and they were still on the moving ship, and they hadn’t yet turned around. He was lost in the middle of the ocean, the sun not yet peeking behind the storm.

And his friends would come running and offer dice and friendship and other horrible vices.

There was a selfishness to it, he thought. To ask him to play a game of dice when he was actively drowning in honey colored liquor.

He grappled wildly into the passenger seat until he found the pill bottle that had built its home there between hospital runs. It fermented itself there, seeded itself into the seat. With his hand off the shift gear, he shook out a handful of aspirin, a few of them flying wayward onto the floor, and dumped them into his throat. They felt like dry rocks, rubbing at the sides of his sandpaper throat and then dropping into his stomach, where they curled up into germinated seeds soaking in a cocktail.

It was his car. And, Dear God, it smelled like him. If he were anyone else, he wouldn’t be able to smell the stale faintness of his aftershave that he was so familiar with after kissing him. The scent of lavender from their shared laundry detergent that was starting to feel like a collar around the blonde’s neck. The lingering scent of hospital and hand sanitizer. The seat still adjusted to his height, his tiny hand hovering over where the larger one used to grasp.

No one to utter, “I’m so proud of you,” to someone who never really heard it at all, something that he tried to disregard as mundane, like ripples on the water.

And he kept driving, hurtling faster past the trees; A meteor to the moon.

There was a bottle of cologne on their shared bathroom counter, but he couldn’t remember what it smelled like; he hoped that he could one day catch it in a crowd, hoped that the haunt had burned enough into him by then that he could stare unabashedly and be able to tell the scent. Here it smelled like his shampoo, the scent of vanilla.

Another flash of lightning.

The smell of melting sugar as it turned into caramel. The one time the driver tried to make caramel, he burned it. The vanilla reminded him of the time that his lover involuntarily tried to lick vanilla extract off of his fingers and choked because of the bitter rush of alcohol.

The time they drank long into the night with the old version of Frankenstein on the TV, and the driver not making a comment about how it was nothing like the book. And they sipped whiskey until it was past their bedtime because they were old.

His lover sat in a rocking chair and said: “This is going to be us someday.”

And the driver said, only a little sardonically: “Not if I don’t grow old.”

The chair reminded him of the chairs next to their bed that neither of them ever used because whenever his lover read his crappy pulp romances he would sit on the bed to read them. And the driver would watch and wonder how satisfying it would be to rip all of the pages out and listen to them tear from the spine. 

And the books reminded him of the time that they both went to the bookstore and his lover watched him as he skimmed the back of the novels, and he picked up this one about a girl living forever and said foolishly: “This is going to be me.”

But he can’t live forever; there was nothing to live life for.

They were the last chapter of a book that they were never going to read, the last ten minutes of a film that the driver slept through, the last drop of water in the entire fucking sea.

Adam at the foot of the deathbed admitting that he pursued Victor Frankenstein to irredeemable ruin and calling him a specimen worthy of love and admiration while condemning him for being a spineless jackass.

God flooding the world so that he could start over.

Suddenly, he couldn’t be in this car anymore.

He took his foot off the gas.

The car started to slow, very slowly. The momentum carried it on and on and on, the headlights only illuminating a few feet in front of it, and eventually it slowed down to a steady 30 miles per hour, but it felt agonizingly slow. Like a snail’s pace. Death’s hand was wrapped around his throat. He slammed on the brakes, the car screeching again, and he just sat there. The rain was tapping against the car. The world around him was pitch black. There were no stars like eyes in the sky; there were no eyes like stars in the bushes. Just darkness, just trees being shaken in the breeze. Just the sound of his heaving breaths as he tried to force air into his white-hot lungs, and the electric blue glow of the car console behind his hands.

He tumbled out of the car, leaving the door open. Rain started to puddle onto the seats, seeping into the indentations of where he once sat and where he once existed. The blonde’s hair was now pressed against his face, flat, stuck to his cheeks and curled around his eyes. He stood there, feeling the water seep into his clothes like blossoming blood underneath his fingertips. He felt the rush of water at his feet and against his shoes.

A flame started to burn against his copper heart; his finger started to tap against his thigh impatiently as though electricity was dancing through it. His face turned hot with fever, and if someone looked, his eyes would have been ice cold, two icebergs about to sink a ship. There was only a little relief with the waves in his stomach. He swallowed, and then spat at the ground.

“Fuck you.” He mutters, the sound being drowned out by static.

He resisted the urge to kick the car.

“I HATE you,” he screams to the rain, his voice cracking and breaking like a stick under pressure. “I HATE YOU.” He crosses his arms like a petulant toddler, and then stomps a foot into a puddle, water flying up in a fountain stream. “I REGRET EVER LOVING YOU AT ALL.” The words choke out. He hiccups, feeling the taste of liquor on his tongue. He makes another hiccuping noise, and then collapses onto the road. He doesn’t know if the water he’s feeling is tears or the rain. His entire chest is heaving, and he can feel acid crawling up his throat, but he also can’t get any air in to breathe. He felt like a kid in class, trying to rush out of the teacher’s classroom and duck behind a wall, rushing back downstairs before anyone caught him.

“I hate you,” he bit out again, and he could feel his jeans soaked through because of the water.

The rain just kept coming down. It showed no consideration and refused to turn off its eyes, preventing him from screaming at the world in peace. It landed in tear-like plops and made the large puddle ripple. It was muddy, sticking like blood on his hands. He stared at his wedding ring.

His wedding ring.

 He never liked the gaudiness of weddings. Never wanted a proposal.

His lover pressed a black ring with red crystals sealed into the band into his palm as they were getting ready for bed one night. He remembered his heart rate speeding up; he could hear his heart in his head like a headache pounding. He rolled the cold metal between his fingers for a moment, feeling the weight of it. And he slid it on his finger. A louder yes than yes could ever be.

The other ring was now six feet in a grave.

The marriage license was still sitting on their kitchen table, now buried by past-due bills and a copy of the death certificate.

“I really fucking hate you.” He said, staring at the ring. It was like the blackest black. Consumed his light and vision of the world all around him. He slid it off of his finger, it getting stuck on his knuckle for a second, and he curled it into his fist. He felt the ring dig into his palm, and he lifted it above his head; a pitcher ready to throw the ball.

He felt his fist close tighter.

A loud sob escaped his mouth, an ugly noise that was a mix between a hiccup and him trying to drag a breath into his lungs and a scream. And he was sobbing. Sitting on the ground with his ring in his hands, he was sobbing.

Like a child who didn’t get enough presents on Christmas.

He hit the ground, slamming his fists against the pavement. The road dug into his skin like rocks from a mountain, leaving these rounded indents. Like he scraped his knee on the playground.

He curled up in the road, clutching the ring to his chest, against his heart. It dug into his fingers like chicken wire, and he wished it could cut them too, leaving thin little scars against calloused hands so that he didn’t just have his memory left. Memory was like receipt paper; it was going to turn black and bruised if there was too much fire held up against it.

“How selfish of you,” he said between hyperventilating breaths, “To fucking leave me here.”

His best friend had sat in a hospital bed and told him: “You’ll be okay.” But it didn’t feel okay. It felt like he had been stabbed with a knife, and he wished he had enough of a will to push himself closer into the blade, because it, at the very least, meant that he was feeling something other than THIS.

His best friend had sat in a hospital bed and had laughed, and had said that the food was shit, and all he could say was: “Well, for a last meal it lacks a certain sense of glory.” And they talked about death row inmates when they could have talked about anything else, and what a shitty thing to talk about to someone who’s dying.

They talked about the Russian experiment of the dog with two heads by grafting them together. And his lover laughed and said: “Funny considering the circumstances.”

He wanted the puddle to drown him.

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The widow didn’t know how long he had laid there for. But he felt this churning in his stomach like he was being tugged on by a puppet, and he sat up enough for him to gag up some of the liquor that had churned in his stomach. The vomit mixed and swirled in the water like chemicals, plumes curling in the water.

He crawled back into the car, his hand on the door handle. The wind was blowing sideways, blowing the rain into his face and cutting his skin like knives.

He could no longer smell the lavender laundry detergent or the vanilla shampoo sticking to his seat.