short thing #16

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.

(c) Samantha Florence, 2013.