Little Drops

You can watch a single train rumble past for the solid part of an hour if you have the patience. If you sit on top of a chain-link fence with nothing to do and just watch. You’ll notice the spaces in between the cars where the floodlights gleam through, the eerie, blaring horn, the clacking wheels, and the squeaking brakes as the train slows down miles before it reaches its destination. The giant, mechanical beast dashes along the earth’s scarred surface every night, waking the neighbors from their dreams. Some never get used to it – the noise, the trembling ground. I grew used to it at an early age. After all, that was my lullaby when nobody bothered to put me to bed.

There aren’t a lot of night guards at the loading docks. It’s easy to sneak over the fence and tiptoe across the tracks to explore what they’re shipping: coal, sometimes crude oil, luxury cars. There are different number-letter combinations that identify each crate, their long codes near impossible to memorize, so I write them in a little leather-bound journal full of useless human curiosity. The majority of the handwriting in it is mine, but some is Seth’s. His numbers suck because the ones look like ls, the threes look like Bs, and the fives look like Ss. And zeros vs Os are impossible.

He hasn’t come around recently, hasn’t met me here in several months. I think it’s painful for him because of what happened last May. It broke his heart.

But after the train passes, I hear footsteps. Heavy, leaden footsteps as if the person taking them holds the world on his shoulders. I would recognize them anywhere. “Hey, Seth,” I say.

He doesn’t reply and simply climbs the fence, sitting right next to me. I shift closer to him. “Seth,” I say.

No reply. He takes a beer from his backpack, pops the top off, and sucks it down. His handsome face is now haggard and pale, his eyes puffy and bloodshot. This bottle is definitely not his first.

“Selfish,” I mumble. “None for me?”

Seth stares straight ahead and then slowly turns, his swollen, watery blue eyes conflicted as he stares right through me. After a minute, he reaches into his bag again and pulls out another beer, placing it through one of the chain loops, but it falls, smashing on the gravel. He doesn’t seem to care. The brown pieces glimmer in the floodlights like pinpricks of dying stars. They reflect in his eyes, those flecks of starlight. He looks at them with such longing that my heart twists. He’s reaching for that light, clawing for it as it grows dimmer and dimmer.

Carefully, slowly, Seth opens his mouth. “You should have been there today,” he rasps.

“At school?” I ask quietly.

“At school. They started whispering about it again. But they’re not sad anymore. I don’t know what happened, but they–they started in again. About how you’re… you know... How we were–”

“Why?”

“It’s funny. After someone dies, there’s this period of sadness, real sadness like some kind of… mental funeral. God, that sounds stupid, but it’s true. Then after the funeral, they start whispering again about what happened, what led up to them standing in all black beside a cheap, old casket. They judge when the shock goes away.”

“I know they do.”

“I… I feel bad, okay? ‘Cause I used to be like them, exactly like them, the king of them. And then you… you came along. Crap, I don’t know what happened. You… My life was better, astounding. Just like you – astounding and colorful and beautiful.”

His voice slips a couple of times, and a large knot bobs in his throat. I can’t tell if those are tears in his eyes or not, but I don’t dare move, speak, or even breathe. He’s never been this vulnerable in front of anyone – even me. I don’t want to ruin the moment.

With a tip of his head, he’s staring up at the moon. Those are tears in his eyes; they’re slipping down his cheeks, glinting in the floodlights. Little drops of him, of whatever has finally burst within his soul. I both hate and love that I am the cause of it. I rub my nose. Then stuff my hands in my pockets.

He keeps staring at the moon and crying.

I let him.

Vulnerability has a way of sneaking up on people and taking them by surprise. It comes at the strangest times, and yet, once in a while, you know exactly when you’re going to lose it.

I know he was crying about what happened last May before he got here. About the vows he took and the ones I didn’t return. The ones I never can. I reach out to touch his face, and for a moment, he leans into it. A wracking, disgusting sob explodes from his lips, brandishing the sheen of sweat coating his trembling mouth, and then he’s done. He pulls away and wipes the rivulets from his face. I can’t help but wonder if they’ll be gone forever, the memory an unwanted blur.

I expect him to get up and leave. To forget he ever bawled like a baby over someone he never glanced twice at before last January. But he begrudgingly stays. His eyes dart down the tracks as if he’s heard something. I hear nothing.

“What’s out there?” I say.

“It’s darker now,” he answers.

“You’re right.”

“So dark. Cold.”

“Baby, it’s May. It’s almost summer. Cold said goodbye in March.”

He stays silent, tapping his fingers on the fence. They’re bloody and short as if he’s been biting them. He didn’t used to have that problem. “Your fingernails,” I say, pointing at his hand. I gulp because I feel stupid for saying it. Yes, those are fingernails, I can hear him say, but he keeps quiet.

I do too. For a while.

Then I mumble, “C’mon, Seth, talk to me. Please.”

Nothing. I drag a hand through my hair, mussing it in frustration. Seth turns away from me and grabs the strap of his backpack, obviously debating whether or not to sling it on and leave. But he still stays. What is he waiting for?

“What do I have to say to get you to hear?” I ask. “Talk to me.”

He opens his mouth, but only a whimper escapes, “I miss you.”

The words tumble out with a raw intensity that stuns me into silence, the force of them raking nails down my heart. His head falls into his hands, and I can tell that this is his most vulnerable point. Tears again stream down his cheeks, his nose, then his lips until he’s swallowing his own sadness. I know what that tastes like. Salty, sharp. He shudders too – inside and out – but there’s no train rolling past. It’s just him, shivering on a fence in the middle of May. Watching the same tracks that took his lover’s life a year ago. And he’d like to believe it was an accident, to believe I hadn’t stood there, arms out, waiting for the rumbling to overtake my body and split me apart.

“I’m weak,” I remember telling him when he found me just seconds before the train made contact. “I’m so, so weak.”

He’d promised that we would escape before hell erupted around us. He’d lied – we both had – and I had paid the price for it. For our slowness, our hesitation, our heels making ruts in the dirt. That price which had left my hips bruised and my pride thoroughly damaged. That neglectful love I’d known from my parents had turned into overwhelming humiliation in a matter of moments, and Seth hadn’t been there to prevent it. I’d been on my own. And in that awful, dark hour, I’d had a moment of clarity. I would always be on my own – always – because I always had been. What would change? And that thought, which was so deeply rooted into my brain, was the one thing I could never have recovered from.

So I’d made my decision. A permanent one, utterly irreversible and utterly terrifying.

I’d headed to the train tracks, texting Seth one last goodbye. The blinding light hadn’t bothered me. The only thing that had broken my heart was the I love you! Seth had hurtled at the top of his lungs over the blaring, frightened horn. For one second, I’d wished it was all a horrible nightmare and that I’d wake up in my bed, sweating bullets.

But I’d known better then and I certainly know better now.

I’m not so sure though that we couldn’t have made it. Maybe we could have gone somewhere, become something, and fixed whatever horrid scars throbbed on our bodies.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” Seth finally says. “I’m heading to Chicago.”

“What? Why?” I ask, rubbing my nose.

He shrugs as if he heard me. I know he didn’t. I know he can’t. “My parents are refusing to pay for my college, and I can’t get a scholarship with the shitty grades I have without you to help me study,” he says. He shrugs again and chucks his empty beer bottle onto the gravel. It smashes right next to the one that dropped. “I’m gonna try the world on for size, the whole big mess of it. I hope you’re proud of me.” He glances at me, and this time, he’s looking at me. “I know you’re there, I just wish I could see you. I know you’re talking to me, rubbing your nose, wondering why I didn’t show more vulnerability or whatever when you were alive. I’m sorry, I should have.”

“Don’t apologize,” I tell him, taking his hands. My own slip right through his, and wisps of tears spring into my eyes. “I miss you too. God, Seth, I miss you…”

The tears are welling, falling. They exist in another plane – I exist in another plane. It’s enough to make a string of cuss words trip over themselves out of my mouth. I can’t hear anything else but them and the distant horn of an approaching train. I hate this. But I can’t go back. Why did I have to see this? He’s the only one who ever cared, and he’s the only one I have to see grieving for me. Anyone else, I would have thought it a miserable cry for attention.

But it took him a year, a freaking year to come back here to me. I hate him as much as I love him.

Suddenly, he jumps off the fence, landing like a panther on the gravel with his backpack slung over his shoulder. The straps are frayed. The color is worn. I tear my eyes from the pack and glance at the tracks. No sign of that train yet, but he’s already running away.

And I follow him. I haven’t moved from the loading station for a year, haven’t tried to. But now I do.

I can.

He drove his car here, but it’s parked a quarter mile back just off of Helm Road in a pocket of shrubs barely up to our waists. It does nothing to hide his beaten, old station wagon. “You’re still here?” he mumbles to me as he unlocks the door.

I slide into the passenger seat. “I’m still here,” I say.

He doesn’t hear me, but I don’t care. We’re going to Chicago, and he’ll make it. He’ll live a comfortable life with another man, a stronger one who knows how to soothe aching, longing scars.

Seth suddenly laughs, the sound loud, maniac, but excited. And I have to chuckle too. His laugh could stop a full-speed train.

“It’s funny,” Seth says quietly, tentatively. “I never thought I’d run into it again so soon – the laughter, I mean. Thank you.” He glances over at the passenger seat.

I smile. I remember now how to do it, how the muscles pull and the joy runs right to your brain. My throat closes up, but I say in a voice just loud enough for the two of us to hear, “Please, laugh again.”