10 Classic Breakup Lines Translated For Guys

Guys, as most of us are good people that consistently go out of our way to make relationships work, it can sometimes be confusing to figure out exactly why we’ve dumped. So I’ve put in the leg work to decipher these common woman-speak phrases into normal, everyday English that we can all understand, so at the very least we can know what’s really going on. Ladies, if you read this keep in mind that we now know what you’re really saying, so there’s no reason to keep sugar coating things. We’re men. We’re resilient. We’re tough. We can handle the truth. Besides, it’s your loss anyway…

1) “I’ve been thinking a lot lately…” Your average break-up spiel will usually start along these lines. This is rarely, if ever, true. The truth usually lies somewhere in the “My friends/family/coworkers have been spoon feeding me a lot of shit about you lately…”

2) “It’s not you, it’s me” (or some derivative thereof). This one is so popular that it has become cliché, and its popularity is due to the fact that it is fucking easy. This one doesn’t need much translating, as it is almost always true, but never for the reasons the speaker thinks.

3) “I still want to be friends.” This is a sneaky little fucker, as it can have multiple meanings. From the manipulative but otherwise harmless, “I’ll keep in touch so I can try to string you along any time I need something” to the downright fucked up, “I cannot wait to get a new guy so I can rub your nose in it.”

4) “I still love you.” Same general jist as above, but with a couple added twists. The first being, “if the next guy doesn’t work out I’m going to come to you to complain about him in an effort to make you feel like an emasculated pussy”.  The second meaning can be a set-up for meaningless sessions of fuck-buddyhood, “I don’t want to have anything serious to do with you, but I don’t want my bed to go cold before I get the next sucker in it.”

5) “I’m just so busy.” This just may be the most insulting of all when you really think about it. Unless the woman in question is the head of a major nation, there is nothing going on in her life that is so damned important that she can’t make a little time. Translated into normal English it goes something like, “I would rather sit in the waiting room while my neighbor’s cousin’s dog gets its teeth scraped than spend time with you”.

6) “I need some time alone.” This one is more a sin of omission than a lie. The full idea behind the phrase is, “I want to fuck someone else, but I don’t have anyone lined up right now (alternately; I have someone lined up but I don’t want to look like a big ol' mattress hoppin’ whore frog), so there will be a small window of time where I am alone. So, yeah, I need some time alone”.

7) “I’m not ready for a relationship right now.” This is another example of women not quite saying everything. The full phrase should be, “I’m not ready for a relationship with you right now.” Because, let’s face it, nine times out of ten, the woman who says this already has someone else taking ghost swings on deck.

8) “There’s nothing wrong with you as a person.” This, basically, means exactly the opposite of what it is trying to say. “There is something that I don’t like about you, but whatever that something is it is so insignificant that if I actually say it even I will think I’m a shallow bitch.”

9) “I don’t want to hurt you.” Using this line in a break-up context makes about as much sense as saying it right before intentionally running someone down with a Mack truck. The translation of this one is, “I am going to reach inside of you, rip your still-beating heart out of your asshole, and then show it to you, but I’m going to tear up a little and tell you I don’t want it to hurt.” Like above, this one is designed more to make the speaker feel less guilt than to actually ease the pain of the listener.

10) “You’re a great guy.” First of all, you’re goddamn right. Secondly, we can all now know what women really mean by this is, “I can only feel whole as a person when my significant other treats me like shit and gives me something to bitch about, so you’ve gotta go.” Happily.

White Scarf

 

            The vertical blinds gave their whispering vinyl clack as I stole out the sliding glass door. In the east, racing behind pine covered hills on the last vestiges of wind from a thunderstorm, low wisps were just beginning to show black before the predawn gray sky. Not high enough to be thought of as clouds or low enough to be fog, the wisps struck me as the sad, forgotten orphans of atmospheric phenomena. I pulled up the collar of my leather jacket, wishing that it offered more protection from the wet cold.

            I could see my breath. Rainwater was still dripping from the roofs and trees. Overhead, weaker stars were getting dim and dying against the power of the still unseen sun, but some stood bright in the deep dark. Broken wind chimes, handed down to her from her mother and which she never had the heart to throw out, tinkled half –heartedly as I crossed the wide, unfenced yard to the gravel road.

            I left behind all of my clothes aside from what I had on my back. I could eventually beg, borrow, or steal more. She could burn everything I left behind for all I cared, but knowing her she would donate them. The thought of getting dressed in some cold, stinking rest stop bathroom and putting on a shirt that she had once pulled off of me in the warm dark of her bedroom was enough to make me sick with sadness.

I caught myself wondering silly, inconsequential things. Would she miss my boots at the foot of her bed? What would she do, with her crippling arachnophobia and aversion to killing any living creature, the next time she saw a spider and I wasn’t there to shoo it out of the house? How many years would pass before I didn’t find myself thinking about her from time to time? How many months would pass before she didn’t find herself thinking about me?

She had neglected to bring in the laundry before the thunder cracked open the clouds the day before. It hung from the line soaking wet and gleaming like bleach white beacons in the gloom. As I passed the clothes I snatched her favorite item off the line. I wrung out the dripping linen scarf, rolled it up, and slipped it into a jacket pocket.

The wet gravel didn’t crunch under foot so much as slide and slosh. Each foot fall sounded like marbles rolling around in a mouth. The puddles were a milky gray and they tried desperately to splash, soak, or seep into my boots. There is a narrow window of time before the sun rises when a diffuse light permeates everywhere and illuminates everything equally from all angles. It is a calm, spooky beauty. I knew that if I were still in bed to see it, her face would be washed with a blue light that would make her look like a stone angel in a graveyard. I knew she would be waking soon, so I hurried down to the paved road and stuck out my thumb.

“Jesus Christ, this goddamned rain, huh?” The big face of a big man in a big truck wearing a big smile. Old gitter-box country music was playing low from his radio. “Hope you weren’t out here trying to hitch in that storm last night.”

No, I was in bed.

“Where ya headed to?”

As far as you’re willing to take me, I guess.

“Well, I’m hauling it all the way down to Redding today, I suppose I could do with some company.”

I got in. The number of feet between me and her bed kept adding up, then the miles. Every one of them broke my heart just a little bit more than the last. Every one of them told me just a little bit louder, this is really over. Every one of them called me weak, called me a coward, called me a liar and a lowlife and a phony for leaving. But I kept racking them up. There was nothing I could do.

She said that we could work things out. She said that we could start over and make everything like sparkling new. Beneath eyes argent with tears her mouth said that she loved me. She meant it. I told her that I loved her more than anything. I meant it. She kissed my black eye. Together we poured every bottle of liquor in the house down the sink and went to bed in each other’s arms. Every bottle except for the pint of whiskey that I found in the pocket of my jacket.

The driver didn’t pretend to not notice the bruise covering a full quarter of my face for very long. I was taking a pull from the bottle when he brought it up. “That’s a hell of a shiner, buddy. How’d you manage that?”

I’m a drunk, these things happen.

“Hell, don’t I know how that goes?” He took a swig when I offered the bottle. “Ya mouth off to the wrong person, get your ass kicked?”

I told him how we got drunk and she hit me with a vodka bottle. How I started to strangle her but stopped. I left out how I started to sob when I let go of her neck and she crawled away from me.

The driver was silent for several seconds. “Hell, we all want to strangle ‘em from time to time.” His laugh drowned out the country music. He punched my arm.

The sun was up and I wondered how long she would worry about me before she dabbed cover-up on to the bruises on her neck and went to work. I wondered how long she would bother with trying to find me. I wondered how long she would be alone before someone else took my place in her bed. I wondered if she would notice her scarf missing from the clothesline and understand that I had left, and why.

It Only Takes One

 

 

 

 

           I was beginning to lose patience as a sling bellied old man mounted the dais at the front of the hot box of a church annex building in which I was sitting. I could tell from his stiff legged taking of the steps that a lifetime of heavy Southern cuisine and front porch sittin’ had taken their toll on his knees. The black trucker cap that sat gingerly over his white hair did nothing to match his slightly too tight cream colored suit. When he turned to face his standing room only audience I was able to see the “NRA” splashed across the front of the cap, and it seemed like the cap fit in with the rest of the room better than the suit.

            “Afternoon, all.” The old man said in a voice of sandpaper and rancid honey, a voice that said he had been smoking for just a couple of decades too many. “Most of y’all know me, but for those of you that don’t, I am Pastor Rutherford, preacher of this here church. I am very proud and mighty honored to have our little church hosting this cause, and it does my heart good to see so many of my fellow patriots come from far and wide to take part.”

            He leaned full tilt into a prayer to open the day’s proceedings, but I couldn’t force myself to pay attention. Rutherford was not the man I had made the trip from California to Tennessee to meet, and I certainly was not interested in closing my eyes and pretending to listen to his prayer. My eyes scanned over the bowed heads in the humid confines of the modular annex, and I had to stifle a smirk that nearly insinuated itself on my face. Never had I seen so many people, men and women, in camouflage clothing in one place before. Jackets, pants, shirts, I was even able to spot at least two men wearing camo neckties. The assortment of baseball caps acting as political billboards was just as fascinating; Dozens of NRA caps, Stars’n’stripes, several NObamas, and the hat on the man right next to me was thanking God for the second amendment. I didn’t have to see the guns to know that damn near every person in that room was strapped.

            “I know that I’m not the man y’all came here to see today.” Pastor Rutherford said, regaining my attentiveness by winding down his speech. “I’d like to invite y’all, neighbors and visitors alike, to join us for services tomorrow morning at nine in the AM. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce a truly patriotic American, Mr. John Hunter!”

            The door of the annex building flew open and a man of surprising proportions entered in a pseudo-march, stone faced seriousness all but dripping from his bald head with the sweat from the stinking Southern heat. He could not have been more than five foot six, but he was the type who made up for his lack of height by torturing his musculature to distasteful bulginess. His black polo shirt, labeled with the fake Sheriff’s badge that indicated Hunter’s own security company, was too small and stretched grotesquely everywhere it made contact with his body. Plainly displayed in a black leather shoulder holster he was carrying what my recent education in guns told me was a Sig Sauer P220, with OD green grip.

            This has all been so easy, I thought to myself. My mind wandered back to the first time I heard the name James Hunter. It was several weeks after a tragic shooting in a crowded amusement park, in which dozens of men, women, and children were murdered by one lunatic with a couple of handguns and a shitload of ammo. As happens every couple of years in America, that incident reignited the centuries old argument over gun control and restriction. I would be lying if I were to say that I greeted the entire circus with anything other than complete apathy.

            That was until James Hunter achieved worldwide notoriety with a three minute YouTube video that went viral in less than twenty four hours. In the video Hunter extolled the virtues of gun ownership, viciously and venomously bashed the president for proposed gun control measures, and encouraged his “fellow patriots to load their magazines, clean their rifles, pack some food, and get ready to fight.” The video was concluded with the words, “If these gun control rules go one inch further, I’m gonna start killing people.”

            Depending on how one took the video, this garnered Hunter both fame and infamy. For my part, the video changed my life. I had to meet James Hunter face-to-face.

            Searching the internet for five minutes, finding out that Hunter would be speaking at an anti-gun control rally at a church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in just two weeks’ time.  This is easy.

            A two day gun safety course and hours of research before deciding which gun was right for me. Locking up my closet of a studio apartment with the twin mattress on the floor and the single place setting in the cupboard. Catching a morning flight to Nashville. This is really easy.

            Walking out of a Nashville gun store with a brand new Glock G19 in my backpack forty five minutes after landing. Hopping a Greyhound and getting checked into a cheap motel room in Murfreesboro before sundown. This really is too easy.

            As James Hunter took the dais I smiled and fingered the Glock holstered under my windbreaker. If it weren’t for Hunter I would never have even thought about owning a gun. But there I was. Again, the thought passed through my mind, This has all just been so easy!

            Hunter’s speech was more or less a live version of his YouTube video. Take to the hills, stand up to the tyrants, kill, kill, kill, that kind of thing. But he ended the rant a line I hadn’t heard before. “I don’t expect any of you to have the specialized military training that I do, but one bullet says more than any amount of talking, and any of you can squeeze a trigger. It only takes one.”

            It only takes one. Those words were on an endless loop in my brain as James Hunter left the dais and people began crowding around him. It only takes one. I may have shoved a couple of people a little hard, but I had to get close enough to Hunter to shake his hand. I needed to tell him how he’d changed the direction of my life.

            “Mr. Hunter!” I reached between two men who were talking to Hunter, presenting my hand for him to shake. I shouldered between the men and stood face-to-face with James Hunter. He shook my hand. “That thing you said, about it only taking one. You’re so right, Mr. Hunter. You’re so right.”

            “Well, thank you, brother.” His face registered no emotion, and there seemed to be some depth missing from his blue eyes. “Stay a patriot.”

            He dropped my hand and turned to acknowledge an admirer behind him but my hand didn’t fall to my side. It slipped into my windbreaker. My well-practiced thumb unbuttoned the strap of my holster. A trained finger unlocked the safety of my pistol. I hefted the weight of the weapon out of my coat. The barrel raked the stubble on the back of Hunter’s shaved head. I heard a short, short scream from somewhere in the room and pulled the trigger.

You Wouldn't Be Here If You Existed

           “Oh, so you want in, do ya? Well, get on in here, boy, we got a little bit of thisthatandeverything just a-waitin’ on ya.” The Roustabout’s smile was equal parts unapologetic sleaze and bottomless promise.

            What is this?

            “This,” The Roustabout tapped his black and yellow barber pole cane gingerly against a flaking and rusty iron gate. “This is God’s Blind Spot.”

            One yellow, buzzing sodium bulb in a bare fixture mumbled light down in a tight circle. On either side of the gate a wall stretched out, fading away into dark distance. It was all uneven sheets of plywood, patched here and there with corrugated tin, plastered with what looked to be sideshow posters. Under bare feet was the cracked mud of a desertdry lake bed, crumbling to dust with every shuffle of foot.

            Where are we?

            “Where we’ve always been, my friend. You there, me here. Me the barker, you the mark.” His shattered headlight eyes had a dim blue glow in the shadow cast by the brim of his red velvet top hat, the kind of blue that lives in the base of a butane flame. He dusted the shoulders and smoothed the sharp lapels of his long-tail coat, black with red pinstripes. Straightened his blood red bow tie, cleared his throat.

            “Step right up, step right up!” He called. “Anything you want, we got it. The reality of every dream, the fulfillment of every fantasy. You can do anything, be anyone, we got it all. For just one low price you can be the master of your own fate. Step right up. God’s Blind Spot is the place for you.” He made a grand, arms wide gesture, bumblebee colored cane pointing at the rickety gate. Glowing eyes stared through me expectantly. “Well, that pitch doesn’t always work.”

            What are you pitching?

            His smile widened, razor edged teeth flashing pearly and silver in the disabled light. “Life. Everything. The freak sideshow of existence. Love, hate, joy, sadness, pleasure, hurt. Truth and lies. Being. You may not believe it,” without warning he whacked what I would have thought was my arm with his cane. “But you don’t exist.”

            My not-hand rubbed where my not-arm had been hit. The pain wasn’t painful, if there really even was any.

            I feel like I exist.

            “And I feel like I could shit gold and piss champagne. Feeling don’t mean fuck-all. You wouldn’t be here if you existed.”

            What happens if I go through the gate?

            “You get to be. You get to live. You get born.”

            And what if I don’t?

            “You’ll stay right here. Just like it’s always been.”

            I haven’t always been here. I can’t remember anything before a couple of minute ago, but it’s impossible to think that I’ve always been here.

            “You think this conversation of ours has only taken a couple of minutes?” His fluorescent all-blue eyes sparkled, a sardonic grin creeping up his ruddy, stubbly cheeks. “You have no idea how wrong you are. We have been standing here having this conversation, literally, forever. Stars and galaxies have lived and died, and lived and died again. The Universe has expanded and contracted and bounced back again countless times. All that has happened while we’ve stood here ratchet jawing. Pretty amazing, no?”

            You said there was a price. What is it?

            “You have to die.” He said succinctly.

            What’s that?

            “Well, if standing here in this empty nothing for all eternity is nonexistence, then dying is absolute oblivion. Zip, nada, nothing. Forever. So, you can stay here looking at my beautiful face until the very last proton in the Universe degrades, and that wouldn’t make me no nevermind. Or, you could shoot the dice and get a life. I’ll warn you, some are good and some are bad. Some are incredible, some are unbearable. You might land one that will last a century, or you might crap out right when your mama squeezes you from betwixt her thighs.”

            Those odds don’t sound good.

            “Maybe not, but it’s a chance. You stay here and you will, quite literally, never get to leave that spot, and I will be your only company. You go in for a life and, at the very least, you stand the chance of getting some freedom for a while. Absolute freedom to do whatever you may please. Other humans will try to stifle that freedom, sometimes quite rightly, sometimes in a cruelly arbitrary way, but there will be no physical laws keeping you from doing as you damn well please. If you want to write the most beautiful music the world has ever known, you’ll be free to attempt it. If you want to make life worth living to everyone around you, you’ll be free to. If you want to torture the helpless or rape children, you’ll be free to try that, too. But I’ll warn you, the others don’t take too kindly to stuff like that. Uplift, create, destroy, blight… It’s all up to you.”

            How can there be a place where one is just as free to rape children as to make beautiful music?

            “Makes you wonder about the faculties of the Old Codger who threw this whole mess together, don’t it.” Saying this, The Roustabout momentarily looked down at his mirror shine shoes. Subtle avatars of guilt, anger, and fear all wrestled for a position on his face.

            All of that freedom, and all I have to do is die at the end?

            He looked back from his feet, almost startled. “That’s all.” The Roustabout raised a white gloved hand and, with a small flashandflourish, pulled a pair of dice from thin air. “Roll them bones, boy, and win yourself some bones to roll.” He dropped the black-with-red-dots dice in my not-hand, razor teeth glinting in his curled lip smile. I tossed the dice on the top of his barker’s podium. They bounced to a stop, but The Roustabout scooped them up before I could see the numbers.

            What life do I get?

            “You’ll find out.”

            I want to know before I go.

            He laughed, the high tones of a jackal bark mingling with the rumbles of earthquake and thunder. “It’ don’t work that way, boy-o. That wouldn’t be much of a gamble now, would it? No, by throwing them stones you agreed to take whatever life you won. Now get on through.”

            With that, the gate gave a horrible rusty squeal, shaking dust off its sharp points and wrought curlicues as it shuddered open. On the far side the dusty ground dropped away. Nothing was visible but an endless expanse of nothing. Nothing but nothing, and all so dark red it was almost black.

            I don’t wa-

            The bumblebee cane made violent contact with the backs of my not-knees, sending me lurching forward. I tumbled over the edge, free fall sicktwisting my not-guts. I fell. And I fell. I fell into…

Toreador

The only place He wanted to go was the desert. No matter how hard he tried otherwise, the only place he could guide himself, the only place his steering wheel and the cogs and gears and tubes of his car would take him was the desert. Somewhere he would be able to take his shirt off and lay out across a rock that would burn his back and leave blisters. Where the sun was unforgiving and could force him to confront himself in ways he didn’t dare on his own. He wanted to be a mouthpiece wandering through the chaos only to realize that the message he’d been hearing all his life was his own. He desperately sought a place where sin, degradation, and evil could be baked to dust and blown away on a hot wind, instead of dripping from his shoulders and hair like a living slime. A place where the impurities could be smelted down to something much simpler, and much more valuable. A place where a center could be found, and eventually abandoned once he realized that no center is needed in lives like ours.

 

 The sun was a hot rain falling on the car, turning it to a tin oven and baking Him soft and hollow. The desert air roared through the open windows but he couldn’t hear it over the thoughts fighting for space in his head. Lives like ours..

 

 His mind was scarred with possibility and possibilities lost and he had no clue as to where time would lead him. Maybe it wasn’t time leading him at all but just a vague sense of escape. A feeling of running away from the losses and rejections of the past. The air in the tires must be expanding in this heat, He thought as his eyes squinted down the highway. I wonder if one will explode.

 

 Joshua Trees flew by the open windows, a landscape cutting around the car at eighty miles an hour. Just keep driving. If a tire blows, walk. Run. Like a desert dog. The two lane road rolled out to the horizon, flat and straight, calling to eternity and letting eternity call on anyone desperate enough to drive this forgotten stretch. Eternity slithered down the highway and crept into his mind to crawl around and make him crazy, but retreated as quickly as it came, frightened by the chaotic, jumbled musings of desolation and angst. As close as is possible to imagine a snake limping is how eternity made it’s way back down to the horizon. Back to some kind of voiceless void. Run, desert dog.

 

            He shook his head against the weariness that was taking over his eyes only to realize it was the heat haze steaming off the road that was blurring his vision. He pulled to the side of the road and cut the engine and quiet fell. The engine no longer rumbled, the wind through the open windows died away, even his thoughts faded out for a moment. He got out and leaned against the car, the hot blue metal stinging him through his t-shirt. He stood in the stillness and quiet that had dropped around him and looked to the horizon. The heat was so intense in this place that it had burned the blue out of the sky, leaving it a bleached gray, only slightly lighter than the enormous and vague thunderhead gathering far off to the east.

 

 He lit a cigarette as he walked around the car and down a small embankment at the road’s edge. He pulled drags at the cigarette as he stood taking a long leak on the desert floor, thinking of the puddle he was making, Maybe something will grow there. And next week it will be dead from heat and thirst. As he zipped his jeans he thought he heard the crunch of footsteps on sand and gravel over his shoulder. He bounded back to the car and looked up the road in both directions but saw nothing. He finished his cigarette and flicked it to the middle of the road and listened hard. For a brief moment he was sure he could hear footsteps, but the barren echoes of the desert confused him as to where they were coming from, but then the footfalls were wiped away entirely by the sound of a car coming up the wilted distances of the highway.

 

            He sat in the passenger seat looking out over the desert, listening to the sound of the approaching car, which never seemed to get any closer. He couldn’t tell if it was the approaching car that was stuck in some kind of highway limbo, or if it were himself, but he didn’t care. He could have pulled off the road into a rip in the universe and he was sure it wouldn’t have bothered him in the least.

 

            A rattling pick-up truck crested the horizon, wavering like a dream from the past in the heat from the road. He wasn’t sure that the heat and lack of sleep and water wasn’t making him hallucinate so he regarded the truck with a suspicious half-attention. Bouncing back at him from rock walls he couldn’t find were echoes of the truck’s tires on the road that interfered with the actual noise of the truck reaching his ears. The result was a disorienting ripple of sound that throbbed in the furthest back part of his brain. He smiled.

 

            The truck looked as if it were going to speed past him, but at the last moment came to a near screeching halt before him. Out of the window leaned a face that looked like it was made from and old suitcase. A smile formed on its lips, stained off-white pearls set against skin the color of the desert itself, with the same texture. “You having car trouble?”

 

            “No,” He squinted against the sun reflecting out of the driver’s eyes. “Just taking a break from driving.”

 

            “OK, then, just making sure.” The old man leaned further out the window, conspiratorially lowering his voice. “Between you and me, there’s a good looking girl walking down the road back there a ways. I offered her a ride, but no such luck. Maybe you’ll get luckier.” The old man winked.

 

            “Maybe,” He laughed politely. “But that’s the last thing I want or need right now. That’s kind of why I’m out here.”

 

            ..That’s too bad,” said the driver. “She’s a looker.” He looked over the desert and a seriousness came about his face. “Big storm building over that way. Lots of storms are born out here, and I’ve seen ‘em all.” The driver became silent, staring.

 

            “You live out here?”

 

            The old man came back to the present. “Me? Yeah, over fifty years. You might call me something of an old desert dog.”  He looked back down the road and pointed. “But here comes your girl. I better get going.” He laughed and waved, pulling forward slowly. “Good luck, boy.” The truck rattled away to some desolate homestead.

 

            He lit another cigarette as he peered down the road, just barely seeing the silhouette of a girl walking out of the heat shimmer. He leaned against the car, listening to the crunch of the girl’s footsteps coming down the side of the road. The cigarette was almost done when she arrived at his car, carrying a duffle bag over her shoulder. He kept his eyes to the ground, letting the hot wind carry the smoke away from his face in contorting whirls. She stopped in front of him and stood in silence for several tense seconds before he glanced up at her face.

 

            “Hey, can I get a ride?”

 

            “But I’m going the same way you just came.”

 

            She smiled like a lifelong friend. “That’s all right. That means I don’t have to look at the scenery and I can get some rest.”

 

            “I don’t have air conditioning.” He offered.

 

            “That’s all right.” She walked around the car and presumptuously let herself in the passenger door. He nervously slipped in behind the wheel and brought the car back to life, easing it back on to the highway. “So,” she said. “What’s your name?”

 

 

 

He’d learned to carry himself with a certain loner-mystique, and people had drawn parallels between himself and James Dean. I don’t really know much about him was almost always his reply.

 

            “When I saw you standing by the car smoking I thought you looked like James Dean.” She spoke with her head leaned back and her eyes closed. “Like his ghost was wandering around out here in the desert or something.” Her hair flew in the wind and he thought it looked like arcs of black electricity crackling around her head.

 

            “I guess there are worse people I could remind you of.” He smiled and turned his eyes to her, really looking at her for the first time. He was amazed that she hadn’t ended up as some kind of statistic on this lost highway. He wasn’t absolutely certain that he wouldn’t yet turn her into one. This is a thing of mistakes and wonder, he thought. “You’re beautiful,” is what he spoke. “Like Natalie Wood.”

 

 She turned her brown eyes to meet his, but he was watching the road again. She smiled to herself and repeated, “Like Natalie Wood.” She closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep.

 

 A thing of mistakes and wonder. One leads to the other and vice versa. She’ll get close and I’ll get hurt. He gently turned the wheel to avoid the carcass of a desert jackrabbit that was splayed out across the road. The rabbit’s innards were a mess upon the asphalt, but, even at the speed he was traveling, for a split second he imagined he could see life in its eyes. Like a pleading, a begging for release from the peace of death. He drove through the heat haze not knowing where he was going, or where he was taking Her.

 

 

 

She took a rolled up twenty out of her pocket and paid for his cigarettes. “Here, let me cover it.” She handed him the change. “Fair’s fair, since you paid for the gas and all.”

 

            “I’d be paying for gas even if you weren’t with me. The cigarettes, too.” He folded the bills and slipped them into her pocket. “Thanks, though.”

 

            As they pulled away from the gas station he asked, “What are you running from?” He lit a cigarette with a match, the flame of which hardly even wavered in the wind rushing through the car. “Or to?” He added.

 

            “I don’t think I can be sure on that, anymore. I’m just kind of running. Away from a lot. Toward a lot. Toward everything, I guess. I’m just running away like I’ve wanted to since I was a little girl.”

 

            “Can I run away with you?.” He asked. “I’m pretty certain I went nuts today and I’m running away from that, among other things.”

 

            “Since we’re both running I don’t see the harm in running away together.”

 

            “OK,”  He said. “I’ll keep driving, you just tell me where to go. Maybe we’ll find something worth stopping for, eventually.”

 

            “Maybe,” She said. “And, maybe we could keep driving like this forever. Watch the scenery and the world change around us, and we could always stay the same.” She smiled a smile that betrayed an insecurity, a weakness of façade. She put a hand on his knee and said, “Tell me again that I’m beautiful.”

 

            “You’re beautiful.” He mirrored her smile. “Like a movie star trying to disguise herself as the-girl-next-door.”

 

 “But I am the-girl-next-door.”

 

            “Not anymore. You’re the girl who ran away.” He said.

 

            A genuine smile crossed her face this time. “I am, aren’t I?” She suddenly leaned across the car and kissed Him, a deep kiss that took him so off guard that he couldn’t stop himself from blushing. She put a hand on his crotch and commanded, “Pull over.”

 

            “Pull over? But there’s no-…”

 

She broke him off with another kiss. “Pull over.”

 

 

“Having lived through the last month I know I can live through anything.” He said, seated atop a boulder about a hundred yards from the highway. “I’ll always be able to call on some kind of strength to get me through any kind of despair. But if I were ever to commit suicide it would be at this time of day.”

 

            “Why?” She was sitting in a natural seat that had been worn out of the base of the rock over unknown millennia. He thought it different and strangely refreshing that they had just had sex and she was sitting so far apart from him. Two worlds that had met and then parted again.

 

            “Look at the sky. It only turns that color when the weather is just right, and when it does it only lasts for a few minutes. And I’ve only seen that exact shade here in California.”

 

 She looked to the sky, away from the brittle blade of desert grass she was twirling in her fingers. A narrow range of purples blended from horizon to horizon, the bruise left by a blazing sunset before night falls totally. “That’s a good last color to see.” She blew the grass from her open palm. “Why, though? Why kill yourself to that color?”

 

            “Hope, I suppose. Ever since I was a kid that color sky has seemed so beautiful to me that it fills me with some kind of hope. Like, if something that beautiful can exist then there must be a god. But it’s a hope and a god so remote that it makes here and now seem so desolate and lonely.”

 

            “Like an exile.” She said. “And not matter how close you get to anyone-…”

 

            “You’re still alone.” He finished her thought. He looked down at Her, but could only see the back of her head. “And we’re still alone, aren’t we?”

 

            “More than ever.” She affirmed. A silence came between them and held on for the eternity of a few seconds. “It’s the rain for me.” She finally said.

 

            “What about it?”

 

            “I’m from where there are lots of forests, big pine trees. When it rains in the forest everything seems to take on extra color against the gray of the clouds. The pine needles are a deeper green, roads look like mirrors, like they’re made out of obsidian. Everything seems so alive and connected. Then there’s me.”

 

            “Separated?”

 

            “Yeah. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, and it feels so good to let the rain drench you to the skin, but I don’t feel like I’m a part of the whole.”

 

            Like you’re a piece apart from god, He thought. She struck him as something forgotten and marooned ages from home and grace, crushed with a nameless faith, the weight of which was misleading and empty, and strength was failing.

 

            “But, it’s not like I’m simply out of place, like I haven’t found a niche or something. It’s like life is this enormous puzzle with all these intricately interlocking pieces and I’m a speck of dust on the surface of the puzzle, not even a piece.”

 

            He slid down the rock and quietly seated himself cross legged on the desert floor at her feet. She hugged her knees to her chest, looking with unfocused eyes at a hairy little spider clambering across the rock near her. “So,” She continued. “I’m not just out of place, I’m something totally separate. Not only that, but I’m intruding, I feel guilty because I may be detracting from the beauty of life and the world by just existing, that, somehow, I make life around me ugly.”

 

            “You’re beautiful, though. You know that, right?” He asked, trying to reassure her.

 

            “Yes, like Natalie Wood.” She jokingly flipped her hair and batted eyes that He could see the beginnings of tears in.

 

            “That’s not what I meant, toreador, but thanks.” He forced a smile at her Rebel Without a Cause reference, but she had turned her eyes to the horizon trying to hide her forming tears.

 

            “What do you mean, then? Tell me.”

 

            For the first time she looked him dead in the eye and he felt his breath catch ever so slightly. Her brown eyes were swimming in a veil of tears that had yet to roll away, rain washed windows to an assaulted soul.

 

            “I hurt people.” She told him with her eyes locked on his. “I hurt people, I hurt people, and I keep hurting them.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes, but one tear escaped and rolled down her face, fell from her chin, and splashed in the desert dust. Maybe something will grow there, He thought. A miracle pine tree that catches rain and never dies.

 

            “I hurt anyone who loves me, it’s like my love for them runs out and I force them away. I keep taking and using peoples’ love and break their hearts and the guilt is crushing me.” Tears were streaming down her face and she was on the edge of sobbing. He looked up at her, enraptured by the damaged wonder sitting before him. She was an emerald with a dark history steeped in blood and betrayal. Those in love with her would murder to have her, but they could never hold her long.

 

            She did what she could to wipe the tears from her face. “Your suicide sky is gone.” She said, pointing to a sky that had gone dark with the onset of night.

 

            “That’s OK, I wasn’t using it. The stars should be really bright out here tonight, so it’s worth having not killed myself.” He pointed to the first visible star which was appearing in the sky next to the silhouette of a lone Joshua Tree. “Venus,” He said.

 

            “Venus,” She repeated. “She’s a bitch on wheels. And Cupid’s even worse.”

 

            “They keep sending people to love you and you hate them?” He laughed, attempting to cheer her up.

 

            “Exactly,” was her reply. “They keep sending all these people to love me, but they forget to send what I need to love them back.”

 

            “It’s just mythology.” He said. “Just mythology and stars.”

 

            “Things were so much simpler when stars were just the holes to heaven, toreador.” He looked up at her with fascination. She was a flawed diamond. Something so pure she shone, but with the taint of depression and hurt about her.

 

            “Things are as simple as they’ve ever been. Holes to heaven, constellations of gods and goddesses, distant suns, it doesn’t matter. Nothing’s changed between people.”

 

            “Something has to change, eventually. Our bodies will keep on living, but all our souls will die.”

 

            He took her hand in his and said, “It’s already happened.”

 

            “This loneliness is awful, toreador.” She was back on the verge of tears.

 

            “What can I do to help?” He asked.

 

            “Nothing. Nothing else, at least, you’ve already done enough.” She squeezed his hand tightly. “Even considering as close as we’ve come in such a short time, and that we’ve slept together, never tell me you love me, please.”

 

            He closed his eyes in the dark of the desert night. “I can’t promise that.”

 

            “Then there’s trouble on the breeze.” She said.

 

 

 

The night passed without dreams or speech, just two people together in loneliness sleeping in the backseat of a car in the desert. He woke in the pale gray of dawn and slipped out of the car to stretch, doing his best to keep from disturbing her. All traces of the distant thunderstorms of the day before had been wiped from the eastern sky and in their place were the soft pinks and purples that are born just before sunrise. A weak imitation of the suicide sky, He thought.

 

            He sat in the front looking back over the seat at her sleeping face. It was difficult for him to get a grasp on the emotions he’d experienced over the last day with her, but he knew what was forming. And he knew she wouldn’t like it. In the quiet of the car, in the calm of the soft desert morning he whispered, “I love you.” under his breath. She stirred slightly but didn’t wake.

 

 The heat of the day was upon them like a tiger when he pulled into a gas station. It was an oasis that would have appeared more appropriate back down the highway in the suburbs that He’d come from. Farms of some kind were baking in the early sun on both sides of the highway, brave patches of green clinging to life in the barren hopelessness of the desert.

 

            He gently nudged her awake and asked if she needed anything while they were stopped. “No, I think I’m OK for now.” She said.

 

            He leaned over and kissed her. “I’ll be right back, then.” Walking across the parking lot he felt a pure asphalt heat burning over him and he could swear it was the heat he’d been seeking when he started driving the day before. He stood still for a moment and closed his eyes, feeling his guilt and hurts begin to cook away. With the right eyes he could imagine someone being able to see the vapors of negativity escaping him. He opened his eyes and went into the mini-mart for drinks and snacks, smiling brightly at the clerk as he left.

 

            Walking back to the car he noticed a small dust cloud being kicked up a way down the road. Her green Converse were kicking up the desert dirt as she walked back down the highway in the direction they had come from. The hot wind tossed her hair as she shifted her duffle bag from shoulder to shoulder, and she turned back once to glance behind and their eyes connected briefly. She turned her gaze back to the horizon of the past and kept walking.

 

            As he leaned against his car watching her and lighting a cigarette he felt the hot breeze turn its attention to him. He felt everything he’d been running from come blowing back in his face. Loss, sin, desolation flowed back to him, air rushing back into a vacuum that has lost its seal. Starting the car to follow her He found a note in the passenger seat written on the back of an old receipt.

 

I told you shouldn’t have said you love me, toreador.

                                                       Because I love you, too.

 

            The car idled softly to itself, a musician playing to the emptiness of a sleeping audience. He lightly rested both hands on the wheel while he stared out at the strange desert fields in a kind of prayer. He noticed for the first time how unpleasant cigarette smoke rising into his eyes could be, a sting that reminded him of the distant memories of tears. He flicked his cigarette out the window hoping it would land in a thicket of dried grass. Maybe it will start a wild fire, burn this whole desert and allow it to start over from scratch.

 

            He crept back on to the highway and let speed gather around him as he watched her disappear in the rear view mirror and thought, Just keep running, faster and farther. He held the note she had written to him tightly in his fingers out the window and let the wind whip at it. He let go and watched it flutter like an origami bird come alive and gone insane. He ran his fingers through his hair and briefly closed his eyes, pushing his foot to the floor and driving like a man pursued by something evil while his most recent shot at salvation walked away into another world.