Falling All the Way
One.
It was always the same, tapping fingers on the steering wheel, blinking back tears; telling myself It’s not that he hates you, Frankie; he just doesn’t give a fuck.”
Headache, cold hands, alcohol breath; thinking God, how many more times can he do this to me?! How many more times will he say it’s not a big deal; just a one time thing; just because we both need it?
Vertebrae aching, stomach turning over, throat choked with tears, and I’m sorry, Gerard Way, but I’m a fucking emotional disaster, and if you think you can fuck me without my sins, fears, broken hearts, breakdowns, painted all over your flawless, goddamn synthetic skin by the end, then you’re one-hundred percent fucking wrong.
I tried to take deep breaths; tried to focus on the reflections from the streetlights imitating moonbeams on the lonely wet pavement ahead of me, but my heart was cracking into a thousand little gunshot staccato beats in time to the fuzzy sound from the tape player in my battered car.
In the time that it took the flashing van to split the road
I actually cared about its destination
The car with the cans on the back and the sign just buried my expectations
It pulled to the side pausing briefly like everyone else, asked the simplest questions
Was it the wife of a lover or a child of a mother or some hated politician?
My bones felt seconds from breaking under the weight of all the fake promises he had made me. Each lie had burned like a needle jabbed into my heart; as if it wasn’t enough that he always whispered sarcastic i-love-yous in that sticky, bloodshot, stale-scented post-intercourse daze, he had to force-feed me those stupid mockeries of kindness too; promises to call me, to send me a fucking letter, to visit me so that I wouldn’t have to make the same miserable drive out to his place every time he needed a submissive sex toy. My skull was aching; my thoughts were distorted like the buildings sliding by in the corner of my car window. I feel like hell; I must be drunk… Have I been drinking? I’m… driving. Have I been fucking drinking?
I shivered; the tape player kept crackling in the background.
And I remember reading all about it in the morning
What an awful sad misfortune
The light had turned red but the witnesses said
His eyes were on the girl beside him
Tense and anxious with all the thoughts of his roughs hands, unfeeling hazel irises, perfect beer-and-cigarettes lips on mine, I barely noticed what was unfolding on the road ahead of me until I was already on top of it.
Accident...
Shit.
I could see the rotating red, white, and blue of the piercing cop cars lights on the deserted road ahead, and I slowed down, squinting through the chipped windshield as I tried to tell whether or not they were blocking the road.
Fuck.
Realizing simultaneously that all the lanes were cut off by six or seven parked cruisers alongside an ambulance, and that I could have turned off earlier if I had noticed, I let my car brake slowly to a stop, rolling forward just slightly towards the crash scene. A road worker, the reflective stripes on his neon-orange vest glinting dangerously in the beam of my headlights, turned at the hum of my motor and waved me to the side, indicating the entrance to a narrow strip of parking lots where I could bypass the accident, but without warning, something dark like a nightmare or insanity crashed down over me and I suddenly stalled, hand moving instinctively to the gear shift and putting the car in park.
There was broken glass on the pavement, scattered yards from the crash location where I could see the streetlight silhouettes of two crumpled vehicles behind the line of police cars, and the images of twisted metal and broken bodies flickering suddenly through my head practically paralyzed me with fear.
Gripped by a sudden, overpowering vicious hysteria, I bolted out of the car, slamming the door shut behind me with a muted thud. My heart was pounding hard against my ribcage; lungs raw instantly with the damp, cold air, and my hands were shaking with fear so strong that it was almost tangible, sitting in my chest like an explosive. One of the officers started towards me, a warning on his frowning lips, but panic catapulted me into motion, and I pushed past him, broken glass crunching under my feet as I reached the twisted body of a smashed minivan and stopped so abruptly that my heart shot upwards to lodge in my throat, a throbbing mass of muscle and blood. Time seemed to stretch and bend in sickening pulses as I slowly looked down at the metal-and-glass strewn concrete in front of me, but when my eyes finally focused, vomit rose instantly to my lips and suffocation began to set in as I realized that I couldn’t fill my empty lungs.
A little girl was lying sprawled on the concrete, her pale limbs skewed at awkward angles, like a broken doll. The pale blonde hair forming an awful copper halo around her face and neck was soaked with blood, and her chest was torn open, exposing muscle, ribs, bloody layers of skin; heartbreak so literal that I couldn’t take it. The air rushed suddenly back into my lungs, accompanied by a tortured scream that tore through my guts like a hurricane, leaving me twisted by cramps and shaking in its wake. That was when I lost control completely, just doubling over in pain and terror and screaming hysterically, wordlessly; screaming pictures and songs and funerals and hospital lights, oblivious to the shouts of the police officers; barely feeling it as one pinned my arms behind my back, dragging me fighting and yelling to the car and slamming me bent over onto the hood, knocking away my air and the ability to choke out anything more than one breathless gasp.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he growled, shaking me to punctuate the words. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I whimpered, hot tears spilling over as I tried to inhale, lungs expanding against my bruising ribs. I knew something in my head was gone now; just like that, and I knew that it was never going to be okay. What had I done?
“Answer me, you little bastard! What the fuck did you think you were doing?” The officer dragged me upwards by the back of my t-shirt and slammed me back down onto the car hood again.
“Don’t be so rough with him, Jerry,” another officer said, coming up to stand beside the first. Bending down to me, he asked “Do you have ID on you?”
I nodded through my tears.
‘Jerry’ jerked me back upwards and released my arms, but I had to plant both hands on the slick metal hood of the police cruiser to keep from sliding numbly to the concrete.
I dug my wallet out of my jeans pocket with shaking fingers and handed identification to the second officer, trying uselessly to fight the streaks of salt and water running down my face, blurring my vision and stinging the cuts Gerard’s wolverine teeth had left to decay on my lips.
He looked briefly at the driver’s license before handing it back, along with the loaded question, “Have you been drinking?”
I froze. “I… No.” My whole body was trembling. I wasn’t sure how much I’d had to drink, or when; I didn’t know if I was even lying or not, the words were spilling almost incoherently out of me like blood or vomit from the filthy zombie cadaver I was. “I… I wasn’t. M-my boyfriend was b-but I wasn’t ‘c-cos I had to drive home…”
The first officer muttered something under his breath- barely- about schizophrenic faggots, prompting a warning look from his partner, but I was too numb to care. I couldn’t get the image of that little girl lying motionless on the blood-soaked pavement out of my head.
The officer who had checked my license thought for a long moment, then finally looked me straight in the eyes, reading my mind with such accuracy that it made me nauseous all over again. “Is there someone you’d like to call?” he asked quietly, but I didn’t really think it was a question. Relief that they were letting me go paled in comparison to the dread of knowing I really had no one to call… no one but him.
Headache, cold hands, alcohol breath; thinking God, how many more times can he do this to me?! How many more times will he say it’s not a big deal; just a one time thing; just because we both need it?
Vertebrae aching, stomach turning over, throat choked with tears, and I’m sorry, Gerard Way, but I’m a fucking emotional disaster, and if you think you can fuck me without my sins, fears, broken hearts, breakdowns, painted all over your flawless, goddamn synthetic skin by the end, then you’re one-hundred percent fucking wrong.
I tried to take deep breaths; tried to focus on the reflections from the streetlights imitating moonbeams on the lonely wet pavement ahead of me, but my heart was cracking into a thousand little gunshot staccato beats in time to the fuzzy sound from the tape player in my battered car.
In the time that it took the flashing van to split the road
I actually cared about its destination
The car with the cans on the back and the sign just buried my expectations
It pulled to the side pausing briefly like everyone else, asked the simplest questions
Was it the wife of a lover or a child of a mother or some hated politician?
My bones felt seconds from breaking under the weight of all the fake promises he had made me. Each lie had burned like a needle jabbed into my heart; as if it wasn’t enough that he always whispered sarcastic i-love-yous in that sticky, bloodshot, stale-scented post-intercourse daze, he had to force-feed me those stupid mockeries of kindness too; promises to call me, to send me a fucking letter, to visit me so that I wouldn’t have to make the same miserable drive out to his place every time he needed a submissive sex toy. My skull was aching; my thoughts were distorted like the buildings sliding by in the corner of my car window. I feel like hell; I must be drunk… Have I been drinking? I’m… driving. Have I been fucking drinking?
I shivered; the tape player kept crackling in the background.
And I remember reading all about it in the morning
What an awful sad misfortune
The light had turned red but the witnesses said
His eyes were on the girl beside him
Tense and anxious with all the thoughts of his roughs hands, unfeeling hazel irises, perfect beer-and-cigarettes lips on mine, I barely noticed what was unfolding on the road ahead of me until I was already on top of it.
Accident...
Shit.
I could see the rotating red, white, and blue of the piercing cop cars lights on the deserted road ahead, and I slowed down, squinting through the chipped windshield as I tried to tell whether or not they were blocking the road.
Fuck.
Realizing simultaneously that all the lanes were cut off by six or seven parked cruisers alongside an ambulance, and that I could have turned off earlier if I had noticed, I let my car brake slowly to a stop, rolling forward just slightly towards the crash scene. A road worker, the reflective stripes on his neon-orange vest glinting dangerously in the beam of my headlights, turned at the hum of my motor and waved me to the side, indicating the entrance to a narrow strip of parking lots where I could bypass the accident, but without warning, something dark like a nightmare or insanity crashed down over me and I suddenly stalled, hand moving instinctively to the gear shift and putting the car in park.
There was broken glass on the pavement, scattered yards from the crash location where I could see the streetlight silhouettes of two crumpled vehicles behind the line of police cars, and the images of twisted metal and broken bodies flickering suddenly through my head practically paralyzed me with fear.
Gripped by a sudden, overpowering vicious hysteria, I bolted out of the car, slamming the door shut behind me with a muted thud. My heart was pounding hard against my ribcage; lungs raw instantly with the damp, cold air, and my hands were shaking with fear so strong that it was almost tangible, sitting in my chest like an explosive. One of the officers started towards me, a warning on his frowning lips, but panic catapulted me into motion, and I pushed past him, broken glass crunching under my feet as I reached the twisted body of a smashed minivan and stopped so abruptly that my heart shot upwards to lodge in my throat, a throbbing mass of muscle and blood. Time seemed to stretch and bend in sickening pulses as I slowly looked down at the metal-and-glass strewn concrete in front of me, but when my eyes finally focused, vomit rose instantly to my lips and suffocation began to set in as I realized that I couldn’t fill my empty lungs.
A little girl was lying sprawled on the concrete, her pale limbs skewed at awkward angles, like a broken doll. The pale blonde hair forming an awful copper halo around her face and neck was soaked with blood, and her chest was torn open, exposing muscle, ribs, bloody layers of skin; heartbreak so literal that I couldn’t take it. The air rushed suddenly back into my lungs, accompanied by a tortured scream that tore through my guts like a hurricane, leaving me twisted by cramps and shaking in its wake. That was when I lost control completely, just doubling over in pain and terror and screaming hysterically, wordlessly; screaming pictures and songs and funerals and hospital lights, oblivious to the shouts of the police officers; barely feeling it as one pinned my arms behind my back, dragging me fighting and yelling to the car and slamming me bent over onto the hood, knocking away my air and the ability to choke out anything more than one breathless gasp.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he growled, shaking me to punctuate the words. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I whimpered, hot tears spilling over as I tried to inhale, lungs expanding against my bruising ribs. I knew something in my head was gone now; just like that, and I knew that it was never going to be okay. What had I done?
“Answer me, you little bastard! What the fuck did you think you were doing?” The officer dragged me upwards by the back of my t-shirt and slammed me back down onto the car hood again.
“Don’t be so rough with him, Jerry,” another officer said, coming up to stand beside the first. Bending down to me, he asked “Do you have ID on you?”
I nodded through my tears.
‘Jerry’ jerked me back upwards and released my arms, but I had to plant both hands on the slick metal hood of the police cruiser to keep from sliding numbly to the concrete.
I dug my wallet out of my jeans pocket with shaking fingers and handed identification to the second officer, trying uselessly to fight the streaks of salt and water running down my face, blurring my vision and stinging the cuts Gerard’s wolverine teeth had left to decay on my lips.
He looked briefly at the driver’s license before handing it back, along with the loaded question, “Have you been drinking?”
I froze. “I… No.” My whole body was trembling. I wasn’t sure how much I’d had to drink, or when; I didn’t know if I was even lying or not, the words were spilling almost incoherently out of me like blood or vomit from the filthy zombie cadaver I was. “I… I wasn’t. M-my boyfriend was b-but I wasn’t ‘c-cos I had to drive home…”
The first officer muttered something under his breath- barely- about schizophrenic faggots, prompting a warning look from his partner, but I was too numb to care. I couldn’t get the image of that little girl lying motionless on the blood-soaked pavement out of my head.
The officer who had checked my license thought for a long moment, then finally looked me straight in the eyes, reading my mind with such accuracy that it made me nauseous all over again. “Is there someone you’d like to call?” he asked quietly, but I didn’t really think it was a question. Relief that they were letting me go paled in comparison to the dread of knowing I really had no one to call… no one but him.