11
WHITFIELD ROAD
“What do you want me to say?”
They both watched the tendons in his thumb dip and flex, she felt the imagined movement of them under her lips, more tears.
“I don’t know,” she admitted quietly.
Tension swept out of the car. This was a tired routine for them, weeks of anger building up inside of her, desperation of not feeling loved. He always caught her words, he always knocked the fight right out of her. She pulled her knees up to her chest, stared out the windshield.
“You know I care about you,” this wasn’t said earnestly. He wasn’t trying to prove it to her, she should’ve already known, and in some ways she did, in some ways it wasn’t enough.
She studied the curl of his hair dark against his cheeks, the sharp cut of his jaw. “I know I unsettle you sometimes, I know I’m a lot to handle.”
They looked at each other with the familiarity of two people who have seen the darker side of the other: the intensity, the drive for something more, the ruthlessness, the fear, the filthy self indulgences, and they kept on staring, black eyes sliding into blue.
when will it be okay for us to just say
'i want to see you'
we were face to face in bed, treading the sheets and I could feel his feet sliding against my shins. ‘no it’s okay,’ I smiled crookedly, couldn’t hold his gaze for too long, it was hard to look at him this close (like staring into the sun).
“I think when we feel unloved we always begin to make up reasons for why that is”
- Me, to you, on a sleepy bus home from Maine
cars beds
cradle,
rocking
a safe space
an intimacy.
and the night turns into cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you’re almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it’s that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what’s warm - whether it’s something or someone - toward us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being safe in the world and ready for sleep, that’s happiness.
- Paul Schmidtberger, Design Flaws of the Human Condition