Sunday, January 01, 2006

53 :

He was sat there.

Behind the wheel of a car. His fingers dancing on the steering wheel. His mouth moving silently to the sounds of FM radio.

You know the type of person he was. Bland, mundane. His computer password was “password”. His ringtone was a factory preset. He lived in a world without personality. He has too many personalities as it was. The evil, demented lover. The emotionally-numb psychopath. The evil, demented,emotionally-numb psychopathic lover.

And in this skewed world, where everything made sense from a certain angle, what was doing was not wrong, not perverse, not dangerous. What he was doing was romantic, was loving, was the sign of true love. He would do anything for love. Anything. Love her forever. Until death us do part. Just whose death, is the question.

Those hands on that dashboard, those hands killed me. The hands of a murderer. The hands that held, the hands that stroke. The hands that cup people’s faces between loving fingers in the warmth of the night. The hands that hold cutlery, the hands that grasp steel. The hands that stretch with sinewed muscle, the hands tremble with fear and confidence, the hands that made love and unmade love. The hands that put people together, and the hands that tore love apart. Those hands. That signed death warrants, that clenched and broke bones, that tore down all the good things.

The hands of a killer, tapping on a dashboard. She offers me protection…

His blood pulses the same as mine did. His heart beats as much as mine did. His soul felt less than mine. Whatever it felt, it felt less for others than it did for him. And all the love he gave was for himself. And all the things were wrong.

His eyes fell to rest on Number Sixty Eight. His eyes, twitching, shivering slightly behind the windscreen. I followed the path of his eyes, and saw not what he saw.

I saw a black shape. I felt fear. It grew darker with the mere presence of him. It fed off us. All of us. Every dark moment, every black second within us, it fed off it, it took energy from it, it grew stronger.

Oh dear, here we go again.

Without opening the door, I sat in the back seat. I tried to throw myself through the window, the steel, the bolt assembly, the door latch, into the backseat of this black Ford. I felt every shard of melted sand tear through me, every cold atom and electron fly through me, and my soul shuddered.

Right now, sat behind him, his head bobbing with the words of the song … cranberry pie and love, the lord watches over from above … and I could see his every hair. The flecks of grey in his wiry head. The small spot at the back of his neck. The cheap, ill fitting shirt and the creases in his jacket.

And I wanted to reach forth and put my hands around his bastard neck and choke the fucking life out of the shitbag. I wanted him to feel the way I felt, and more.

And I had to sit and wait and watch. Time crawled. A second or two became a lifetime. Time stretched out to infinity. I could see a flash of yellow, her hair, in the window. A hand noted the time, the date, the movement.

The black shape moved out of the building. It fed on hate. He loved what he couldn’t have. He hated what stopped him for loving. If only he could remove me, maybe she could love. And with me gone, maybe she would love him again. Could she love him?

Of course, I knew better. A love where one feels one cannot leave is not a love – it is a prison. He had a life before her. He had a life after. And now, she was gone, before I came. I did not take her away. She chose to leave.

And this is my punishment. I get to smell the sweat of the man that killed me for hours.

Sometime. After far too many bad songs on Bland FM, I lose count of them. The repeats. The bland, dull conversations. The talk shows, the phone ins. The boredom of hearing dull singers singing dull songs for the millionth time. Another car comes and parks in front of this. The back lights, reversed up to us, flashed twice.

Clutch. Brake. Second gear.

He flashed his lights twice back. Turned a key, an engine caught, coughed, started. He drove away, into the night. Me, again, in the back of the car with him, not knowing where we were going.

Into the dark.

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