what have we done?
She
remembered that he sat in the driver’s seat while she sat as a passenger.
Looking out the windscreen at a foggy, Spring night. Maybe eleven. Twelve o’clock.
They had parked on the nature strip.
Waiting.
She
watched the condensation from their repeated breathing grow into a mushroom
cloud in the middle of the window. She watched as it crept toward the edges. The
moisture that was once inside them was now on the glass. Was moving to the
bottom, already encasing the top, of her vision. Into the dark.
She
was cold. Not sure how he had felt. She hadn’t asked. He seemed to be smiling
at a secret pleasure. That she wasn’t a part of.
As
she looked towards the vacant lot they had parked beside, she wondered what
else was happening in the world. Outside.
When
things got difficult, she often wondered about distant places. About babies
with flies on their eyes, eating a porridge made from dirty water. Whose
mothers looked sad. Whose brothers had no shoes. Sometimes this helped her with
perspective.
But
mostly it made her cry.
This
night, she just wondered how many people were currently having good sex in her
street. In her town. On the planet. How many people were having good morning
sex, drunken sex, after party sex, non-consensual sex, first time sex, break up
sex, make up sex. Sex that they liked.
She
wondered what that felt like.
She
wondered if she was always going to feel like she did then. If this was the way
it was eternally going to be. If the windscreen was always, in some way, going
to cloud her sight of the nights that she had envisioned. She wondered if there
was a way in which she could change the repetition of the night. This night.
The night she had known before.
The
night that was now repeating. Obsessively. Uncontrollably. Continually inside
her brain.
She
looked at the dashboard. It was the same. She looked at him. Staring out the
driver’s side window, now. She looked again at the night in front of her. What
she imagined it looked like. What she thought she remembered from when they
drove up. She saw her breath come out of her and attach itself to the front
window. She looked again to the vacant land and could see a street light on the
street on the other side of where they were. Rays of light beading and shining
out, in straight lines, in the fuzz on her passenger side window. She turned
again. Again to the dashboard. Again and again to him. Again and again to the
misty windscreen.
And
again.
She
remembered he turned the car on then. Turned the heater on. Looking at her. Blasting
her breath and his breath away from the windscreen.
And
again, she could see the dark in front of her.
