The Passenger
The night hums. The road hums back.
I can’t tell if I’m the one driving or if the car is carrying me somewhere I already promised not to go.
(This is fiction. Happy Halloween.)
The headlights stutter like a dying pulse. Every time I blink, he’s there again, quiet in the passenger seat. His arm rests on the open window. The wind moves through his hair.
He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t have to. The silence between us is thick enough to drown in.
I grip the wheel tighter. “Say something,” I tell him. “Anything.”
He exhales smoke that disappears into the dark. “What do you want me to say?”
I almost laugh. “You could start with I’m sorry. You could start with I shouldn’t have come back.”
He looks out the window instead. The desert is endless. The stars are indifferent.
“You said you cared,” I continue. “You said you weren’t ready, but you still came back. That’s not confusion. That’s cowardice. You knew what seeing you again would do to me.”
He doesn’t answer. He never does.
I’ve learned to forget myself in his silence, to shape-shift into something easier to love.
I was defined by his indecision. Waiting for nothing, while draining myself empty.
If he raised a hand, I jumped. When he walked away, I chased.
I wanted to be in his life. I wanted to matter.
A smile splinters his face.
I used to love his smile, but his expression looks like it would hurt me if I got any closer.
“You always took things too seriously,” he says.
“I took you seriously,” I say. “Was that a mistake?”
The car keeps going. The road stretches forever, signs repeating like a broken spell:
GAS. MOTEL. NEXT EXIT.
Each turn looks the same.
Each mile feels like déjà vu.
I pass a few rest stops. I start to notice the exit numbers.
They haven’t changed for miles.
I think, I’ve been here before.
This is the loop. With my ghost.
When I glance back at him, his features blur, there, not there, there again.
“Are you real?” I ask.
His eyes won’t meet me. “You tell me.”
I stare ahead. “If you’re not real, then why do I still feel your skin against mine?
I remember you burning your hand on a magnifying glass in the sun and shoving your hand in your pocket to hide from the other kids.
I see your scared face in my nightmares, and I’m only scared because you are.”
He doesn’t answer. He never will.
I pull over. Gravel crunches beneath the tires.
The desert swallows the engine noise until the world is only wind and heartbeat.
I sit there a moment, hands on the wheel, breathing like it’s the first time I’ve remembered how.
I turn to him again, but the seat is empty.
For a long time I just stare at it, the outline his body left in the leather, the faint smell of smoke that never really leaves.
Then I open the door. Step out.
The air is cold and dry. The horizon flickers light pink and lilac.
Behind me, the car idles, waiting.
I put one foot after the other and keep moving.
The road will keep going, with or without me.
He can stay there. He will always stay there, stuck in his own ways, searching for himself at the bottom of a Tito’s bottle.
I remember feeling jealous of vodka.
She gets the real him.
Despite myself, I head toward the sunrise until the headlights disappear, until there’s no sound except my own footsteps on the dirt.
For the first time in a long while, the silence belongs to me.