The sky was split open and tumbling, crude and grey and yellow. It looked like the back of the moon. Everything shone and we could hear the war. I thought about everything burning.
There wasn't any dreaming that night, only nightingale song we couldn't hear, storm clouds spun the colour of lillies and the bruises that made an atlas of my arms and legs, and rainwater collecting in the gutter that we couldn't be trusted with. I couldn't sleep again and spent most of the night twisting the bedsheets into rugs and curtains so that I could live with myself. He woke a few hours before daybreak and I asked him to teach me how to sleep but he knew that I didn't learn anything that way so instead he told me bedtime stories. The one about the fairytale lion chasing old souls and big roots across oceans and down to the middle of the earth where they intertwine like hydrangea vines. Whole armies and navies buried with their glasses on because some people believe that death is a sleep that ends in the sky.
The next day came as promised and we didn't waste time. We got into his car and drove until we hit a wall of stars. The summer heat knew us. It simmered around us, connecting us to the great men in history We play a game I made up that involves picking our favourite words out of the poetry anthology I carry in my satchel wherever I go, and fashioning crowns out of them. Our laughter snowballed as the sun rose higher above the blue car. There was only one other car as far as we could see. Muffled drums, cracked bells. The car couldn't go as fast as ours. I didn't think we were laughing at the same thing.
We thought of as many words as we could to describe distnace. Because of the sun, his hair grew lighter and his skin darker; I was sure that at any moment he could disappear.
It began to rain so we stopped on the side of the road. "It never rains here does it?"
"No." We stayed. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a hardcover book on ancient cartography. I used my poetry anthology . Receipts and a clean paper napkin fluttered out of his book when he opened it, stepped out of the car, holding it over his head. Rain looked nice on him. He became the song playing inside the car. I don't remember it but I think it was good.
It looked no different from outside the blue car than from the inside. "Why was that in your glove compartment?" The book was soaked. We took to leaning against the car and staring at invisible things. He whistled; it was grating. The way he was talking in the rain was more like biting. After a while I climbed into the car and he follows me in, tossing his book into the backseat, absolutely ruined. There had been a brief inscription in the front cover but it was entirely indecipherable then.
We drove on some, until we were at the edge of the city. Beauty and light and noise are all the same thing and they are fulsome. We left the car in someone's driveway as there was no parking outside the diner we wanted to go into. My dress was damp from the rain, and time was getting on and we hadn't transformed yet as we'd agreed we would. There was hardly any light inside. We sat in a booth much too large but perfectly secluded and I ordered pancakes, nothing on them, while he orders a sandwich with grilled cheese The waitress was bleary-eyed and unfazed when she brought us over cups of tea and a jug of tap water. He requested some lemon and ignored the strange look he received in exchange, concentrating instead on arranging the sugar pots and cutlery nicely on the tapble I was beginning to fall asleep so held onto his arm tightly and told him to keep me awake, I wanted the pancakes. To pick myself up with false energy, I slipped to the ladies room, where the inside made me look wily, or like I was sickening for something.
For a small moment, we sat there, just breathing. "Did you ever think about how your possessions will outlive you, like shoes and stuff." He didn’t really ask it, because he knew I wouldn’t say anything. "You can’t go to sleep, we are talking and the pancakes aren’t here and you might have a nightmare and I don’t know how to deal with that sort of thing."
He disappeared for a while and returned when his grilled cheese arrived, smelling of cigarettes and something else, I felt my thoughts thinning and he pushed his plate aside, the food mostly untouched, making space to lie beside me. Whispers, loud and obtrusive, were exchanged. Even the hearts in my heart were fatigued. He said that he felt set apart from me forever, especially after today. He said he felt afraid.
The next morning I woke up in his room to a quiet expanse of excess. The thick folds of sad light that had been coating everything had been pulled back. I looked at my forearms and saw that the bruises that yesterday still made maps of my skin had faded, leaving me pale and blossom pink.
"Is the war over?" I asked him, half-sitting when he came in. The room smelt of coffee and the Carpenters song 'Close To You' was playing on a loop from his record player.
"No. Why?"
"Everything feels happy."
He left because he had a job interview and I stayed for a while to write down some words I dreamt about. I didn't like myself for stealing paper, so I put the words on the refrigerator. There was a photograph pinned up of a pearly moon; it was poignant but I didn't like it.
