The Sun Never Rose

At midnight I take a shot of Jaeger and the shivered burn in my belly gives rise to an inexorable desire. “I think I have to leave tonight,” I say to Andy, the foudroyant spark of spontaneity cementing the urge in me. He frowns knowing my dreary eyes can’t tell that lie tonight. “But I’m going to need some blow.” The hippie bartender who smells like grass and tells me he loves me will know where to score, I think, and he does. When he places the baggie in my hand, thin and wrinkled as his unrequited eyes, a smile tries to twist my mouth, but I leave without saying I’m never coming back. Andy knows it’s time to go home and pack and his frown darkens to disappointment against my artificially brightened glance, strangely reflecting our futures in our faces. Three hours pass in the tiny apartment and my life sits stacked in careless piles by the door. Knowing there is nothing left to pretend, we carry me in pieces to the back of my beat-up Jeep. In the deepest breath of night I jam the oversized screwdriver into the space where my ignition used to be. I leave my closest friend behind to the crisp closing dark of a thankless city. I erase each sigh of highway in my wake.

Tired and fighting to remember my reasons I inhale the only thing keeping me alive as I slice the air in front of me a hundred miles behind. The weight of my eyes is heavier than the last bitter bump can shoulder and I reach blindly to the next of the stash, grasping at consciousness. Pulling the torn plastic into the light of the highway; it ‘s empty. My addictions anchor me to concrete and we sink. In the stale yellow of the dingy dome light I look down and see the crude powder has vanished in the ashtray like snow on a salted sidewalk. Four hours left to drive… I run my finger along the edges of the dirty console and across my gums, chasing a memory of lucidity, a shred of satisfaction.

After bickering with the night for another fifty miles I concede to caffeine. The streets make no sense. Sign after unfamiliar sign whips in trails behind me like chatoyant apparitions refracting a light that wasn’t theirs, or mine. Where the fuck am I going? My voice cracks to no one. I have driven 85 North one hundred times before, but never on these roads. Two hundred miles of towns that never existed lie lined like the dead on the deserted asphalt and bitter truck-stop coffee is no substitute for sanity.

The sun never rises as black yawns into grey and sharp dashboard greens fulgurate against the coming light like hallucinations from drugs I haven’t taken. As the loveless dawn illuminates my sallow face, the city of Richmond lies dormant on the highway and, though I know where I am, I am irretrievably lost. I stop again with the despair of sleepless confusion puckering my mouth. I peel cheek from teeth sucked sticky dry with acid coffee and too many cigarettes. But my bendered body cannot put up the fight and another hundred miles taunt me to leave it all ahead.

I wake to the shifting paranoia of last night’s shrouded doubts assaulted by the foreign paychecked pulse of the eager early morning District. A shadow of a girl, I crawl my way down Fourteenth Street and let the last four hundred miles flash and barrel behind me like graffiti on a passing train. And with it all gone, my beat-up car and beat-up body come to a stop. Illegally parked, I leave half my life in the back of the only home I have and stumble to his stoop. Littered familiar with empty beer cans and cigarettes smoked to less than ashes the corpse quiet of the porch and dead-bolted door lead me to his basement. Through the dirtied panes I see him. Lying in his awkward graces, his limbs hang from the couch like breezeless branches. I twist the dented, tarnished brass of his only unlocked door and climb into the flawless still of everything I thought I wanted. Sleeping like he needs no one I slide beneath the crook of his lanky arm like a plastic doll not daring to breathe more than that molded perfection. He shifts in the bliss of unconsciousness and wraps me closer, the rush of requited curling me into every inch of us. For one perfect hour I lie in his oblivious grasp and play our half-truths like a lullaby. When he finally wakes to my presence imposed he kisses me too honestly and holds me as if he was already gone. “What are you doing here?” He asks with confusion in the once-sweet rasp of his groggy voice. In the darkness of his basement, fighting the ineluctable day, my last dose of hope drowns. I answer with the only truth I still know from crumbling reverie, “I don’t have a fucking clue.” As soon as it tumbles from my lips, I understand. He was never a destination, just another cup of coffee to keep my eyes from falling coffin closed. And, as ever, it was time to get back on the road again.