the jet club

I wakened in darkness — complete, cold darkness. But I wasn’t alone, I was never alone.

This couldn’t be the end and yet it wasn’t the beginning, either. I was somewhere else in the familiar feedback loop.

I opened my mind up to her, “Jonne, you know we can’t keep doing this,” she rebuffed me.

She was waking up, too. I flinched as I felt her mind stab into mine yet, after the initial shock of otherness I welcomed her in and she spread through my body like cold water. I was nothing and she was all. I breathe, you breathe.

We had spent the whole night entangled again. It was now still dark, but it was that early morning darkness laden with promises and cool gray tension. Dressed only in secrets and a shared inability to speak, we instinctively moved into the kitchen to find something to eat

Triangular light split the room.

“Do you like strawberries?” I ventured, only mildly interested in the contents of the open refrigerator.

The cooled air seemed to pour out onto the floor and wrap around my ankles where there was a small scar on the top of my left foot. I got it when I was twelve after climbing a tree in a neighbor’s yard and then falling out of it on my way back down. I broke a few metatarsals and so my father The Valiant Personal Injury Lawyer had the neighbor for everything he was worth on negligence and I got some bone screws. The purple scar has curved with time, and now it tightened just a tiny bit more than the skin around it in the cold. As I was contemplating the circumstances of the injury she caught me off guard with an honest question: Do you need me?

I couldn’t answer, I could never answer that. To give the truth is to accept it and for us that meant to die. I breathe, you breathe.

“No, Ysa. I don’t need you and you are free to leave.”

She didn’t buy it, of course, and she turned away from me moving quietly back to the bedroom. That tiny, heated room where we conjured our mistakes and miscommunications; where we consummated our lone purpose over and over again; where the only witnesses were lampshades and window sills; where we lie among the tapestries and stylish knick-knacks upon expensive linen sheets — sweat gleaming on our brows — wishing we were someone else somewhere else.

I followed her eagerly.

“Let’s lay the torch to all of this.” It was not a suggestion and I was not able to decline.

“I need you.”

I know.

I’ve always known.

I breathe, you breathe.