The Color of Boom

BEFORE
I
I'm a reckless mistake
I'm a cold night's intake
I'm a one night too long
I'm a come on too strong

The wind is blowing and people are bustling and she’s a little tipsy when she first sees him. It is cliche and against everything she believes in (independence and self love and reality) when their eyes lock and suddenly she is no longer cold. She tells herself the one shot too many is what draws her to him. It is not the cut of his jaw or his lips around a cigarette. It is not every cliche she can see bleeding out of him and into the autumn night.

It’s reckless and stupid and not at all like her when she leans against the wall next to him, turns her head, and asks slowly for one.

A crooked grin spread its way across his face in the low light and he nods like she knew he would.

He hands one to her, she pulls out her own lighter, and it’s quiet. Something she isn’t expecting. She thinks about how she needs to catch a cab, call a car, something because her legs are far too tired from dancing to make it to a train. It’s a Friday, she can afford it.

“You’re quite fit,” she nearly drops her cigarette, lost in her head despite it being cloudier than usual. His voice is slow like sweet molasses with an accent she hadn’t been expecting.

“You’re quite brash,” she spits back like fire, his grin cracking bigger. Her brain is clouded, but not enough to keep her from keeping up with him.

He isn’t anything she wants. He is exactly what she avoids. Cocky in a leather jacket, long, messy hair pushed off his face. He looks like he writes pretentious ramblings, reads authors she despises. He looks like sin. He looks like mistakes. He looks like regret.

But she goes home with him anyway. Lets him call her “baby” and leave bruises on her thighs. Lets him breathe pretty words that taste like poetry down her throat.

She has no idea why. Why she’s throwing herself into something she knows isn’t good. In any other situation that would scare the hell out of her, but instead she embraces him. Maybe he’s the change she needs, she tells herself. The one night thing to pull her out of her rut.

She’ll never see him again anyway.

II
All my life I’ve been living in the fast lane
Can’t slow down
I’m a rollin’ freight train
One more time
Gotta start all over
Can't slow down
I’m a lone red rover

She stays for three days. She breaks all of her rules. She tells herself it is not because of him. It is not because of his smile or his lips or the way his hands fit her hips. It’s because of how his sheets smell and the view from his bedroom window and the way he seemed to memorize her body before her name. It is because all she has done for the past month is a vicious cycle of schoolworkstudywriterepeat.

She does not like him. She likes how he makes her feel. It is simple. It is nothing more than two adults enjoying each other’s company and engaging in (a lot of) consensual sex.

But he is not what she expected. He is pretentious ramblings and authors she despises but he is also mismatched socks and his favorite pop song on the radio while he cooks. That's what hooks her.

He hooks her. Sinks his hooks into her chest and doesn’t let go.

The third night she’s there is different.

They can’t keep their hands off of each but it’s different. The touches are delicate and careful, like maybe they can both feel the end of the chapter nearing. Like they’re trying to turn the pages a little more slowly.

He shows her albums and albums of photographs, all instant films, after she tells him about how years ago she’d tried a photography class and failed out.

They’re beautiful, he was born to take pictures she thinks. They’re all angles and moments that she would never catch or think to be significant in real life. But he took them and magnified them. She’s jealous and in awe.

There are shots of everyday life, someone’s thick socked feet against his kitchen floor, moments from the road with his band, a faceless body strewn across an uncomfortable looking bench, and things she can’t quite decipher but can feel stirring in her chest.

She learns what opposites they truly are. He has been to more places than she can think of off the top of her head, but he names them easily, pointing at photos that wouldn’t even give the place away. She has never even left the country. He has been out of school and pursuing his dream since his teens. She has never known anything but school and work and hoping for a break. He has never slowed down. She has never sped up.

She likes that about him. He is wild and unpredictable and free, everything she longs to be, she can see it through his photographs. From dusty roads in Arizona to glittering skyscrapers in Tokyo.

She doesn’t want to leave, she wants to stay and consume him and all that he is.

DURING
III

I’m a hold my cards close
I’m a wreck what I love most
I’m a first class let down
I’m a shut up sit down

When he leaves they are most certainly not together. Not the first time when he’s gone for three and a half weeks, playing shows down the coast nearly every night. Not the second time when he leaves her for another country for the first time and their days are hours apart.

He leaves pieces of himself in her apartment like traps, daring her to pick them up, feel what she’s missing. He leaves pieces of himself in her chest like shards of glass, she can’t remember what parts of her are just her and not bits of him. Sometimes it’s so much that she can’t breathe. Sometimes she sleeps on the sofa because her sheets still smell like him.

She isn’t sure when it became so much, when they became so much. How he weaseled his way into her life and her heart. She knows they began to burn just like they lit, hot and fast. And him being away feels like a bucket of ice water.

The burnout is slow and agonizing. The calls are sparse, the texts even fewer and farther between. The first time he leaves she wonders if maybe he’s just not used to someone waiting for him hundreds of miles away. The second time he leaves she realizes that shouldn’t matter, she should matter but she doesn’t. Not like he does to her.

There are flickers of the flame though, but not like before. They’re angry. They’re passive aggressive text messages and phone calls cut short with that press of a button. They’re broken promises of calls that never come from the person she needs most.

“Why’re you doing this?” she asks when a call finally comes. It’s three am where she is, staring at the ceiling imagining shapes and colors that her eyes have never seen. Anything to keep her mind off of the anger threatening to flare in her chest and rush through her veins, hot and heavy.

“Doing what?” he’s drunk again. Like the first night they met. But this is no longer romantic or mysterious. This is turning into a tragedy.

“Tearing this apart,” she breathes it down the line like her best kept secret and tucks her knees up to her chest like a line of defense.

There’s a heavy sigh. A pregnant pause.

“It’s all I’m good at.”

IV

I am a head case
I am the color of boom
That’s never arriving
And you are the pay raise
Always a touch out of view
And I am the color of boom

They are hot and cold. When they’re together it is good. Unbelievably, inexplicably good. Like the sort of high you get from a rollercoaster or skydiving. But when they’re apart it is hell.

He tries to explain, tries to justify his thoughts and his actions and their consequences. Why he can’t stay in one place too long, whether it be physically or mentally. Why he is always subconsciously tearing things apart before he ever even gets a good grip on them. But he has never been good with his words like her.

She tries to understand, tries to put herself in his shoes and in his head. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand why it can’t be simple. Why they can’t laugh and fuck and exchange sweet words without him leaving her behind and dropping off the face of the earth. It isn’t fair.

That’s what she yells at him when he shows up out of the blue after nearly a week of radio silence. She shouts until her ribs and throat ache, until her chest feels empty of it all. Until she sees him break down for the first time.

In all these months she has never seen him cry. She doesn’t know if he sobs and shakes or if he is silent and still. She has never seen him so vulnerable. She has never witnessed him with his heart cracked open, for everything inside to spill out into her hands.

But they find themselves in her shower, her tiny, cramped shower with the shitty water pressure and faded shower curtain.

He repeats apologies into her skin like prayers. But he can’t find an explanation, no words holy enough to save them.

“I-I’m fucked up,” he repeats in a whisper again, when the water has begun to run cold and they’ve stood there wet and clinging to each other silently and hopelessly for an eternity.

“So am I-” she tries to tell him like she does every time he tells her that, but he’ll never have it. Hushes her with his lips in the dip of her collarbone.

It’s silent again for a long time, not like it usually is, and she realizes they’re thinking the same thing like they so often do. This is it. It has collapsed around them just as quickly as it rose. She feels helpless, she can’t fix this because she has realized she hasn’t done anything wrong. This is him.

She does the only thing she feels might get through to him. She pulls away, enough to cup his jaw, press a kiss to the crease between his brows, and whisper a soft and timid, “I love you,” for the first time.

And then she steps out of the shower.

AFTER
V
How did it come to this?
Love is a Polaroid
Better in a picture
Never could fill the void

She no longer knows when or if he’s coming back. She hardly knows him at all anymore. She doesn’t push or pull, she lets him drift away. There’s nothing she can do to anchor him to her shores.

He has turned her into a cliche. It’s a rainy Saturday night and she’s sitting crosslegged on top of her rumpled covers, a sea of memories spread in front of her. Postcards and polaroids and post-it notes. She recognizes places he’d been when he used to call, photos of her messy hair splayed across his dark pillow case, his loopy little handwritten notes always signed with x’s and o’s.

Looking at it all from the outside like this makes it hard to understand why it didn’t work, any of it. It all seems so happy, so carefree and simple. None of it shows the real story, the dirty details. The fights or the calls that never came or the deafening silence. None of it shows the inside of either of their heads at the darkest times.

She thinks about how maybe it could have worked. She thinks about all the time they needed and never got. She thinks about the things that can wrap their way around his brain better than she ever could, ever will. She thinks about how much different it could’ve been had any one variable been changed. She thinks about what her mother used to tell her.

April showers bring May flowers.

Most of all she thinks about the taste of his skin. She thinks about the rasp in his voice when he’s just woken up or had a bit too much to drink. She thinks about how much less lonely she felt in the very beginning, how it felt when it started, how that should’ve made it worth it for both of them. She thinks about how she loves him so much it still can deflate her whole chest if she lets it. She thinks about that Lolita quote.

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.

VI

I'm a midnight talker
I'm an alley walker
I'm a day late two-face
I'm a burn out quick pace

The first time he saw her was in this city, a blustery fall night. Now it is nearly summer but the cold ache in his bones is still present. So his first night home, he drinks.

He wanders the city with a bottle of vodka concealed in a paper bag. He walks past the venue they met outside of. He walks past her favorite Greek place. He walks past her apartment. He walks until his feet ache and blister and he’s forgotten the scent of her shampoo.

But neither the burn of the alcohol or the ache of his feet are enough to numb him from the feeling of entering an empty apartment after so long. No lights left on, no welcome home, no messy sheets with someone waiting underneath.

He is tired, but not the kind that goes away with a good home cooked meal and a full night’s sleep in his own bed. He lays awake for hours, revels in the scent of her still in his bed and then scolds himself for it. He wonders if he’ll have to move. She is in every corner and crevice. She is who he wants to tell first that he is back for a while, a very long while. She is the last thing he pictures in his head before his mind finally drifts to sleep and the first thought to jolt him awake when the sunlight pours into his room.

Something in him shifts that first morning alone. It is cold and rainy, the type of morning that makes it harder to get out of bed, harder to push away that darkness that clouds his brain. But he is getting up anyway. He realizes it’s because of her. Because despite their ups and downs, she was always there, always a certain and permanent thing. But he hasn’t heard her voice in months, hasn’t received a text in weeks.

It’s like his body is on autopilot when he pulls himself out of bed, brushes his teeth, throws on that flannel she got him last Christmas. It’s like he has no control over himself when he finds his legs carrying him to her side of their city.

VII

I'm gonna get ready
For the rain to pour heavy
Let it fall, fall
Let it fall upon my head

The first thing he thinks when he knocks on the door is that he should have showered, he should’ve put in more effort. He wonders if he looks as tragic as he feels that maybe she’ll pity him and not shout as much when she sees it’s him.

The first thing she thinks when she opens the door is that she is trapped in a dream, though she isn’t sure if it’s a nightmare or a fantasy. She isn’t sure if she should yell at him and slam the door shut or if she should hear him out because maybe something is terribly wrong, maybe he’s dying.

There is an eternity of silence, neither of them sure who will make the first move or what cards the other is holding. They drink each other in after so long, him with his tired eyes and wrinkled flannel and her with her tangled hair and floral sleep romper that’s looser than ever. They truly have become a tragedy, in every sense of the word.

He knows it’s going to have to be him and that it should be, but that doesn’t make it any easier to force his lips to move and his lungs to work. He needs to tell her. Tell her what happened, that he isn’t leaving this time, that maybe this is their chance, their time. This is what he could never give her. This is what she begged him for. This is what they have waited for.

“Please don’t shut the door.”