Conversation

I feel like dying.

That was all it said on the page. Really, it was a slip of paper. He expected a book-- reams of pages in uneven, sloppy, and possessed prose. But, aside from thinking for a few moments, it took her about three seconds to properly express to him how she felt… in just four words.

She couldn’t say it aloud. She was better at expressing herself on paper, she said. He pushed her on this, but finally agreed. Write it down, he said.

“I feel like dying.”

He read the words on the piece of scrap to her and she nodded so that it seemed like she herself hadn’t even written it. She merely acknowledged that, concerning how she felt, it was very much true. By avoiding the verbal recognition, she pretended these words weren’t hers. But they were.

“How do you mean?”

She sat silent as his brain cocked and laid out multiple readings of her statement. It was a habit of his to unpack words like this. It caused him to over-think and to second-guess almost anything he ever read or heard. In this case, though, the habit came in handy as he had to start somewhere.

She was still silent. “Do you feel as if you are dying?” was his first question.

No response. He waited then moved on. He felt like a private investigator or a judge. Judge felt like the wrong term to him, but this is what he felt like. His second question, “Do you feel like what you imagine it feels like to be dying?” was, too, met with silence.

He felt strange. He had no idea what she meant. He felt any of these might be true, but that he was straying from her intent, questioning her psyche, and causing her to become upset.

Finally, “Would you like to die right now?”

It took a few moments just looking at her before he even expected to begin waiting for an answer. Then, matter-of-factly:

“All of them, maybe.” This with a shoulder shrug and a tear logged glance up and out the windshield. It was the first time she ever let it out, it seemed. Like she had never even come close before this one moment.

He held the slip of paper above his lap and began to softly cry. Not loud enough to hear, not wet enough to see.

“I’d like for you to be happy.”

And as she stared out the windshield, breathing slowly and swallowing when she could, he added:

“And I’d like to be part of the reason why you are.”

He may have caught her off guard now as she may have caught him similarly, moments ago. She still had no words. He felt he had his, but lost them as he opened the car door and stepped out of the passenger’s seat. They avoided him, still, as he opened the door of the car parked next to hers and stepped into the driver’s seat.

He placed the key in the ignition and turned it over, all the time testing out the tint on his window. He couldn’t see her so he pressed the button down until she understood to do the same.

She was putting on her jacket, finding comfort in her seat, and settling in to the realization that he thought she was crazy. He didn’t, for one moment, ever think she was.

She looked at him, and he felt the chance to speak one last time.

“I love you,” he said. But, he rushed the words and mushed them into one “uluhvewe.”

She smiled, moved her purse, and he drove away.