The Vultures of Room 23

The Rosewood Motel housed victims of car trouble, runaway teens with fake IDs, and married couples hiding their affairs. We loosely fell into the first category, but appeared to be in the second, which is probably why Janet at the front desk provided us a room key and a judgmental brow lift. A downpour slammed against the lobby windows like an animal, thrashing against the glass in a desperate desire to be let in. I watched the rainfall as it drowned the shrubbery outside. Rose bushes rattled with the wind’s violent blow, and fallen petals stuck to the pavement like streaks of blood.

“Thanks,” Isaiah said to Janet, grabbing the key card and breezing past me. Without a word, I followed him into the storm. The motel’s lights flickered and threatened to blow out, which didn’t inspire confidence in our accommodations.

“What’s the room number?” I asked. He mumbled twenty-something, and despite not hearing the last digits, I didn’t ask again. We stopped in front of 23 soon enough. Flies hid in its moist corners, and I prayed to shrink and follow suit.

White, hot lightning struck as he inserted the card into the rusty metal reader. He had to do it twice before the light glowed green. Unlike with the lobby door, Isaiah held Room 23 open—a chivalrous reflex.

“Thank you,” I said.

He merely stepped inside after me. We soaked in the sight before us, our shoes caked in mud, our fingers sore from lugging wet bags, and our tired eyes staring at a single bed.

I heard him mutter, “Fuck.”

“I’m sure a motel room hears that often.” Isaiah didn’t laugh. I swallowed the chronic lump in my throat and said, “I’ll find some sheets and settle on the floor.”

“No, no,” he sighed. He dropped our duffel bags by the room door and ran his fingers through his damp curls. “You hate camping. Take the bed.”

“Sleeping on a floor with pillows and blankets is different from camping. Plus, this place is kinda creepy. I wouldn’t mind being able to hide under the bed…”

“Via, just take the bed, please.”

“It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Then stop arguing about it.” He’d used the same frustrated tone when his Honda Civic sputtered on the interstate, and a previous drizzle intensified into a flash flood warning. Fortunately, Exit 33 spat us out in front of the Rosewood Motel. Unfortunately, it spat us out together two days after we’d decided we were no longer “together.” A three-week road trip left me without $2,500 and a five-year relationship.

Well, five years if you stitched together the two breakups and reconciliations. Sophomore year ended us once for three months, senior year did it again for six, and yet here we were a year later, back at the same fate.

He added, “Your neck will hurt if you’re flat for too long, and the last leg of the trip will be worse when you’re cramped inside a car in pain. So, just…”

I rubbed my nose with my sweater sleeve. “Yeah, fine, I’ll sleep in the bed.”

With that settled, Isaiah tapped his phone screen. Knowing him, he was searching for when the rain would clear and the closest mechanic shop to Rosewood. The nightstand’s lamp hummed beneath the quiet.

“No service.” He tossed his phone. It landed so stiffly on the mattress that I no longer felt guilty about him sleeping on the floor.

“It’ll probably be working by the morning.”

“Hopefully.” His eyes flicked to mine. They were a brighter cobalt tonight. I didn’t know why. “You can take the first shower, by the way. I’m going to raid the vending machine outside for some snacks.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want anything?”

I shook my head.

He said, “If they have the purple Doritos, I’ll grab them for you.” I had no time to protest. He fled out the door, the storm rushing in—rain pounding, thunder clashing—only to be smothered again as the door squealed shut behind him.

Shower it is, then.

The tub was cleaner than I’d expected, and the water ran hot. Really hot. The faucet was a sensitive kind that leaped from freezing to scalding with a twitch, but I eventually found an even temperature. I washed off the rain and the sweaty odor of a long day spent on the road, and tried to scrub away the last thirty minutes, too. Unfortunately, a pink, travel-sized loofa from Walmart only cleaned so much. It couldn’t reach the nasty, nuanced cracks of a broken relationship. When I finished, both the bathroom and I smelled of the motel’s lavender soap.

Maybe it’d cover the stench of awkwardness, no doubt lingering outside the door.

I shrugged on a sweater and oversized Batman pajama pants and stepped out before I convinced myself to hide in the tub. Steam followed me. Isaiah munched on a bag of Lays and half a turkey sandwich. He tossed me purple Doritos and my own sandwich container from his makeshift floor bed, one after the other. I checked the label. Mine wasn’t turkey; he’d bought ham instead. Isaiah always prioritized remembering what I liked.

Fuck this motel’s vending machine. Why couldn’t he be a petty asshole who got me radioactive tuna?

“It’s not expired,” he said. “I checked.”

“Oh, no, I was…just…”

“It’s ham, too.”

“I’m not that hungry.”

He cocked his head, the shadows softening his features into something familiar. “It’s not poisoned, either. You can eat it…” …even if it’s from me remained unsaid.

I didn’t know how to live like this. Not in the “I’m-not-gonna-survive-without-him, chowing-down-ice cream-and-yelling-at-RomComs” way, but in a simple way. How did I act knowing he had the knowledge and ability to care for me, but permanently decided not to? No ham sandwiches and Doritos waited for me after this trip. Ending the relationship a third time may have been a mutual, messy accumulation of bullshit every college couple goes through, but God, it didn’t feel mutual. I still wanted him, despite all the frustrated miscommunication and emotional distance we’d been trudging through.

I tore open the plastic and bit into the stale white bread so I wouldn’t have to respond.

Isaiah cleared his throat, and I knew that he wanted to talk. I wanted to do anything but, so I dug my teeth in for another chunk, biting so hard the whole slab of ham slipped into my mouth.

“Via?”

I hummed through a mouthful of salty cold cuts.

He asked, “Are you, uh, wearing my pajama pants?”

I paused chewing and lifted my eyes to his. He was already staring. With my mouth still full, I mumbled, “Weren’t these a Christmas gift?”

“Those are the ones you stole on Christmas. I just never asked for them back.”

I swallowed and said clearly, “Oh, you can have them. In the morning, I mean. If you want.”

“No, it’s fine. You like Batman more anyway.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.” For what, I wasn’t sure.

“It’s cool, no big deal.” He shifted in his tangle of dusty blankets and pillows. “We should sleep…Long drive tomorrow…”

“Yeah. Yeah, we should.”

He lifted his arm, switching off the lamp and its buzz, plunging us into darkness.

“Are you comfortable? On the floor?”

“I’m good,” he said.

Rain still pattered outside, the howls of wind and leaves circling like vultures. Being a vulture must be odd. The best day would be when you found something dead. Humans didn’t like dead things; we hated endings. Exhibit A: Isaiah and I in Room 23.

I settled onto the mattress. Down to my left, Isaiah breathed. No snoring, so he was awake, but the ebb and flow mimicked the storm. I listened to both forms of peaceful chaos, and eventually, my chest fell into a similar rhythm. But no amount of white noise could lull me to sleep. I don’t know how long I spent finding patterns in the popcorn ceiling, though it must’ve been hours. Dawn wouldn’t come, no matter how long I waited.

Time had paused. The universe would not let the night end without me speaking to him.

Isaiah still hadn’t snored. Maybe he was searching for the shapes above us, too.

Nerves fluttered around my stomach like we were kids at a sleepover, up past bedtime. I whispered, “Are you awake?”

“Maybe,” he whispered back.

“See any cool shapes in the ceiling?”

“Just mold.”

“I think I saw the Bat symbol.”

“Of course you did.”

The moment stretched, and before it snapped painfully like a rubber band, I asked quietly, “Did your parents ever lose you in a store? Like, as a kid?”

His blankets crinkled. “Not that I remember. Why?”

“Oh, well, my mom did.”

“When you were seven or eight, right?”

“You remember?”

“Mhm. Remind me,” he said. Isaiah didn’t need any help with his memory; it was like steel. But he always knew when I had something important to say. He never let it go unheard.

I cleared my throat. “Well, I played in the toy section too long, I guess, and when I turned around, she was gone. I searched the whole store for her. I was too scared to yell her name because that meant admitting I actually couldn’t find her, so I just walked aisle to aisle. Probably 10 minutes later, she grabbed me and said she’d been looking everywhere too…”

Isaiah stayed quiet, and I kept speaking. The darkness made it so that he couldn’t see my heart, and I couldn’t see his. “I remember how relieved I felt, like my lungs had dropped to my stomach, but then immediately shot to my chest. I could breathe and swallow, and talk. I was okay because I had my mom.” I scratched my nose; it got itchy in the spring. Isaiah usually carried around Claritin for me. He had frequent headaches, so I stashed Tylenol for him. But we’d have to buy our own packs now. The emotions I’d been harboring spilled out. “Since we’ve decided to…end things…I don’t know, I’m lost. Like I’m searching, just waiting to feel safe and relieved, but it hasn’t come yet. Do you kinda feel like that, too? Lost? After…”

The blankets rustled again. His voice was more hoarse than before. “You’ll be fine without me, Vi. You don’t need me.”

“It’s not about needing you.”

“I know. But you’ll figure it out. You always do.”

I gave him a beat, but he didn’t fill it. “That’s it?”

Isaiah exhaled like it physically hurt. “Anything I say, I’ll just end up taking back in the morning.”

I wanted to scream, Then don’t take it back, but the silence screamed for me instead. Sunrise crept through the blinds, the safety blanket of the night seeping away.

“I still love you,” he said quietly, because it was the one phrase he wouldn’t regret.

“You don’t need to say that.”

“I mean it. You have such a big heart, Vi, and you make sure everyone in your life has a piece of it. Especially me. But you don’t leave enough of it for yourself.”

In the glow of a breaking dawn, birds cawed to announce the clearing of the storm, and I remembered vultures again. They eat carrion to survive. In a way, I’ve done that too. I’ve picked at relationships that flatline because if I dig enough, I’m convinced I’ll find the nutrients I crave. I’m full of rotted breadcrumbs because it’s all I’ve digested. But no amount of scavenging will satisfy the want for more.

I need to love myself more than I love him.

I am not a vulture. I am human. We are built to mourn, not to feast.

“I don’t want this,” he added, which is also what he’d said two days prior. “But I think it’s better if we go our separate ways for now.”

“We’ve done this before. In high school.”

“Yeah, but we’re not in high school.” We were real now. We lived outside the bubble, and we were dying. “Maybe…” He sighed. “Maybe, in another few months, or a year, wherever life takes us…”

“What, we’ll be here again? Stuck in a motel room?”

“We’re not stuck anymore,” he said. The clouds had parted, the morning had peeked its head in, but we still spoke like the night could hold our secrets. “All I’m saying is that we never know. If we’re meant to be, we’ll…be.”

I’d tended to believe in that cliché love bullshit, but it didn’t feel so cute anymore. It felt like a crutch. Maybe, for now, if, you never know…

Breadcrumbs. Carrion.

Life can happen to you, or you can take the reins and steer it. I said, “I still love you too,” but the declaration was different from his own. Isaiah would understand it was a goodbye, not an opening. Our issue was never a lack of caring; it was a lack of prioritizing. We were so wrapped up in each other, our roots suffocated instead of growing. And when we finally figured our shit out separately, we tried to make the relationship work. We really did, but no heart can pump blood into a dead shell. We weren’t each other’s happy ending; we were an outgrown routine.

He merely whispered, “Okay, Vi,” because he knew I would no longer be a vulture in Room 23. I didn’t watch him get up, but his shuffle was loud, and the bathroom door closed with a creak.

We are built to mourn, not to feast. I turned it over again and again, like its own love declaration, until my thoughts stopped circling Isaiah. I am human. I am human.