The Ride
By Duke Jarvis for FW 22
He loves her like a car ride on a cold, rainy day. The way droplets burst against your
windshield and leave trails of light-bending obscurity on the way down. The way windshield
wipers work strenuously to clear the glass, to let you catch your breath for a moment between
waves of blind anxiety when the path ahead becomes a kaleidoscope of melted taillights and stop
signs. The way each breath coats the glass and fog creeps in towards the center from the outside
edges. The way you get tired after a while from trying so hard to see clearly. The way your eyes
glaze over with reckless acceptance and your grip loosens on the steering wheel. The way you
drift gently over the painted lines toward the shoulder, and you don’t imagine the pain, only the
romantic image of yourself hanging upside down in a ditch on the side of the road, suspended by
your seatbelt, blood dripping down your face, mixing with the rain coming in through your
broken windows and pooling on the cloth lining of your car’s roof. He loves her like a car ride on
a cold, rainy day, so when he dreams, that’s where he finds her waiting.
He’s dreaming now. She’s sitting there next to him in the car. They’re alone together.
The moon is shining brighter than it should be, but he can’t stop looking at her. She presses her
warm hand against the passenger-side window and the imprint it makes against the cool glass
frames the night sky. She looks back at him. Into his eyes. Into his heart. Her face is smooth in
the shadows, dimly lit by the glowing blue buttons on the stereo that sits between them. He
thinks she’s more beautiful than anyone else ever could be. He thinks there’s an endlessness in
the darkness of her eyes, and he thinks that there is a sad beauty in that. Sad because he knows he
will never be able to see as deeply into her as she does into him.
He knows he’s dreaming. He knows that when he wakes up to the alarm rattling on his
nightstand, threatening to crack his blank plaster walls, that he will be alone. Alone alone. And
that he will, compulsively, swipe through his phone trying to find some whisper of hope that she
might be his someday. Maybe she had left her boyfriend and he just hadn’t found out yet. He
knows this won’t be the case, that all he’ll find is her smiling face and His arm around her and
those same eyes that he was sure would see something in him that even he didn’t know was
there. He knows that it is only for now, only in his dreams, that she would love him in this deep,
knowing way, so he keeps dreaming. And in his dream, when the raindrops burst against the
windshield, he laughs and she laughs and they are together, and the rain seems to fall to the
rhythm of their shared heartbeat.