THE SIMPLE ACT OF BREATHING (opening)
I found that I was more nervous than I thought I would be on the way to the graduation party. A sickly feeling had flooded my stomach and I thought I’d start trembling like a scared child. I thought my teeth would be prone to chattering in that state and I gripped my steering wheel tighter in what felt like feeble fists. I pull into the driveway, and it went on for an infinite amount of time through a sea of pine trees. It was the perfect place to make a blood sacrifice.
One of my classmates greets me with a gorilla sized hug and promptly spills a good amount of Natural Ice all over my hoodie. He takes a sip from his beer without an apology and throws an arm around my shoulder to not so gently guide me into the thralls of seventeen and eighteen year olds. It doesn’t take very long for the other graduates to spot me and most have a similar reaction to his. You’d think I was some straight edge goodie two shoes the way they all crowd around me and congratulated me for popping my party cherry.
I keep my ears open to the pointless banter. I retreat into myself, and drink what seems like a limitless supply of beer because when one cup is finished, someone brings me another.
People started talking to me about classes. Started talking to me about other parties. They asked if I remembered obscure memories from our time in school and I was surprised to find that I had no recollection of the things they were speaking of. I had kept my head down and my eyes glued to my papers. I had kept my mind full of hidden judgements. I gave my classmates attention, I listened to their troubles but it all went in one ear and out the other. I held doors open and responded with “You’re Welcomes” when handed a “Thank You” but I never made eye contact. I knew their names Alissa, Gabe, Morgan, Tom, Beth, Sara and Sarah with an ‘H.’ I knew that basic information and that they were sopranos, cellists, quarterbacks, and chess prodigies but I didn’t know what their favorite foods were or if their parents made them run cross country. I didn’t know who had issues with pimples, or who slept around the most. Was graduating the same high school, enduring the same teachers, and marching in band really enough to give you common ground? I didn’t think so, but these people were alien to me and they appeared to believe that those simple commonalities were enough to warrant inclusion. I was over analyzing everything, and I knew I wanted to leave.
I wouldn’t deny that their was a slight fuzziness in my vision or that I felt myself stumble over my own steps, and I wouldn’t deny that I knew I was drunk but there was an overwhelming need to remove myself from the situation. My nervousness had been accentuated, and I did not feel a greater need to fellowship more in this most ancient of high school traditions. No one much noticed as I made my way away from the bonfire. I was a novelty, an anomaly of a peer and that unique quality had faded quickly. I suppose I didn’t expect that newfound love to last, but it was somewhat nice while it was there. Eventually though, I was sitting in my parents Subaru.
I didn’t know how to have friends, or what to say. I didn’t know how to have fun with the stupid casual things they had fun with. I started the engine. My dizziness I felt had dissipated, the alcohol was relinquishing some of its hold, and I shifted into drive and found my way around the cornfield and passed the other cars.
The long stretch home was the best. Those empty country roads bordered by fields of corn shrouded in an absence of light. If I had just pulled off the road I could walk on forever it seemed, and I could abandon my car, abandon industrialization, and technology. Abandon social conventions, and feeble mortal aspirations. I could abandon all of that and be alone with my thoughts. The simple sounds of the car engine pushing the box of metal forward and the wheels rumbling over the concrete, it was calming, in that way that whale sounds are too people who can’t fall asleep. I wasn’t sure if I was better for this feeling but I did know that all of those voices drove me nuts. All of those memories, and ideas that I didn’t share in.
We lived in one of those suburban communities just on the outskirts of the city proper. Some place between there and the country. I turned down a side street when the country highway had turned into a four lane highway. It wasn’t the normal route I took home but it was the sort of way to go when you wanted to take your time. I took the next turn a little sharper than normal and I was only a few blocks away from my house.
I had come to an immediate stop. My foot pressed against the floor as if itself braced for impact and I could hear my breathing accentuated in that silence above the whisper of the engine turning. “Oh shit.” I found myself saying through the purr of the motor, and I stepped out of the car. I left the door open, my hand gliding over the inside surface as if ready to brace myself from taking anymore steps into the situation i now found myself in. My headlights showed her there, lying on her back, her arms sprawled out to her side and one leg atop another. She wasn’t moving. I took simple steps forward and I already felt a fear of discovery come over me. I looked up the road and then back over my shoulder and tried to peer up and down the other areas of the intersection. There was nothing. I knew she would have to cough, stand up, say ouch, or something. Even cry. Any sort of noise was better than this eerie silence, because in that quiet nothingness was an eruption of truths that I did not want to be involved in. “Hey, are you okay?” She was dressed in little smiley heart pajama pants and shirt. The faces colored in shades of green and purple and her hair done up in a small ponytail. It must have been two o'clock in the morning and my blame shifted around to her parents because how could they have let her come out at such an ungodly hour. She should have been in bed by ten comfortably quaint under a blanket under the protection of a dim night light in the corner. But she was there. I noticed the pool of blood forming under her head. My heart sank. I looked at the front of the car as I made those centimeter seeming steps toward her body and there were no discernable markings that she had even impacted against the hood, but my own eyes knew that it was the reality. I had just killed this child.
I knelt down beside her and lifted her slightly and rolled her onto her side. The blood had begun pooling in her hair and it stuck slightly as i rolled her. It didn’t appear to be seeping out anymore but the gash in her skull was apparent and sickly. I apologized a thousand times in my head and a hundred out loud. I moved for my cellphone but then I looked up and down the road again, over my shoulder and to my left and right. It was quiet, small forests of trees obscured the scene from any surrounding houses. No one could see me or judge me. If God was up there he was the only one watching, but why would he let this happen to me. It was already a confirmation that I should have stayed home, that only disaster would strike if I ventured out of my house, pursued social circles, or entreated to try to do new things. For one reason or another I curled my arms under her neck and under her knees and her hands flopped about at her side and I carried her to the Subaru and put her in the back seat. I quickly slammed the door and sat with my frightened fists against the steering wheel, and I felt I had already come to far. I shifted into reverse and backed out into my original street before driving forward in adjustment and back on out toward the country road.
There were only devils on my shoulders prying and primping me up with their pitchforks and spewing fire into my mind. I could not be caught they told me, I told myself. Think of all that work you had put into yourself. All that work. Wasted. There was a dead girl laying on my backseat and I found myself worrying about degrees and perceptions. I pictured my face plastered on television and on rag journalism that popped up on my Facebook feed. It was petty, it was a sort of evil, and I knew it. My heart retracted deeper into my chest cavity. My stomach sank. Some kind of flight instinct infected my brain and I was fast becoming some deplorable monster. My left fist was stuck as though melded into the steering wheel and my right hand was shaking at my side so that I moved it to join its mate and hid its anxiety in a tightened grip against the leather. There was an abnormal calm in that drive. As the yellow lines melded in front of me at fifty-five miles per hour. As every headlight passed over my eyes I imagined that they had telescopic eyeballs extending out of their windshields to peer at the sin I was committing. That calm persisted, and I made sure to keep my eyes locked on the road in front of me.
It was a strange feeling not second guessing where to go to hide a body. Where once I admired the empty spaces of the country as a place for reflection and solace I now saw them for a new awful potential. I turned down another mirrored road out there in the middle of nowhere. One that had far less commuters, so that it was practically none, and when I had gone a good enough distance I parked and shut off my lights but let that familiar engine hum continue. With a turn of my key I know I would hear the chirping of crickets, and the obnoxious guttural croaks of frogs, but above all that I would hear the expulsion of my breath from my heavy heaving chest. The keys did not turn, and the engine persisted. I tried to stare at my reflection in the rear view but the absence of street lights made that impossible and I wasn’t about to turn on the interiors. At that moment I was happy to be a void in the darkness. But, I felt eyes on me, maybe of the girls ghost, maybe of God, but I could beg forgiveness later. In those moments I was ashamed with the knowledge that I didn’t know who the hell I was anymore. An overachieving antisocial son of a bitch it seemed, and a murderer.
I took a deep breath and opened up the back door and collected up her body. I expected it to be cold and stiff, but I wasn’t aware how long it took for a body to do that. I had never had to experience such a course of action as to warrant the reward of that sort of knowledge. Now I had it. Like an incurable infection, and it was going to sit inside my thoughts like a cancer.
There was a ditch at my feet when I turned around, and I made a first step to go down its steep edges. I stepped over the reeds and they dragged against my jeans. I took another step and the girl grew heavier in my arms. The clouds began to part overhead so that the full moon’s light shone full and bright against her face and I locked my eyes there. I didn’t know how I could have done this, and I thought of my sister and it sickened me that someone could possibly do this to her, but I still persisted, and took yet another step like some fucking devil, like a malicious and selfish imp. Then her eyes opened wide as if startled by the wild, and I was taken aback in a panic and I dropped her and fell back against my ass into the wet grass. I saw her rolling down the side of the ditch until a subtle splash rang out in my ears at a rigid volume. And I scrambled up to my feet back up to the top of the hill. Once there I gave a urgent stare up and down the road, and saw no one, no witnesses. The moon was obscured as it once had been behind the clouds, and it must have been the shock playing tricks on me. I was satisfied with that answer, but my instincts urged me down the hill, urged me to go down and fetch her out. Planted in my place I waited for a sound of life in my ears, it did not come.
When I pulled into my driveway later that night I could not bring myself to go inside immediately. I knew I had made the wrong decision, because any sane good person would know that. Yet, I made the decision I made and it was then that I was afraid of my truth, the truth of who I really was, of what evil I was capable of. Then I cried, a deluge of tears till I knew my face had absorbed them and my skin was blotched with that salted dryness. As if crying was enough, but crying was never enough to clear your soul and this was going to be the first day of the rest of this life, and I had no idea what to make of it. Not anymore.
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