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When the winter came, people grew quieter and the trees were left barren. Standing in the middle of the town, you could hear only the muted blue screen light of TVs glaring on previously warm faces, you could hear only the singsong of cash registers. What made it hard was that the town had died not a rapid death: a car crash would have been bearable, a knife in the heart would have hurt less, but the town was known for these slow, heavy sighs; the sporadic brakes of time were more than commonplace. It was that either no one noticed, or they knew all too well and did not say anything; but the wind was mushy and unpleasant, also the hands in the coats, and the boy with the runny nose at the bus stop. So they packed a few things and got in his car and drove south, and west, sometimes southwest and right and up and in circles. They stopped in gas stations to pee and to fill the car with more gas and to buy mostly strawberry milk and occasionally cupcakes, until they were wary of strawberry milk and cupcakes tasted fuzzy and moist.
"They taste like home," he said.
"It's like eating what you're running from," she said.
They did not plan it ahead; they were bad at planning. She was a dancer who danced around her room to herself and he was a short story writer who wrote stories with a dictionary at hand. They did not complete each other because they were bad at that, too: completing did not come to them naturally. Some days they were convinced their sum did not add up to a whole, that the final product revealed more cracks than it covered, that what they became together asked more questions than it could answer; some days the world had too many wholes and needed the breaking apart, the softly crumbling of toughened cookies, winding of roads into smaller paths to reveal small, unforeseeable kingdoms rooted on bare earth. But they had tried. You could not blame them for not trying, because they had tried, and when they tried, it was spectacular. And it was not easily breakable, and the crumbling not at all that soft, and that made things harder. They fit like mailmen on front porches, like children in mud. They came together like an art piece, insignificant and exhausting. (Nevertheless) insignificant. (Therefore) exhausting. It was what the poet would have painted, what the writer would have sung.
So there was no plan, just the goal: to escape the barren streets, the hushing of people. She was a dancer, she danced in her room to herself; to her the mushy wind on one's face was uninspiring and predictable and was to be abandoned without hesitation, was not to be left to second chances. He was a short story writer; he lived for things you could find under rocks, in pockets of old wintercoats, secrets buried in the back seats of cars. He was somewhat of a pocket himself, a pocket without a wintercoat; so it was either that he did not know it, or he felt like searching, searching for something little in something vast, the excitement of which made him scream like a little child. And unbeknownst to him, she was the secret sleeping on the backseat, she looked just as warm and unforgettable. At least until she woke up with the kind of rush characteristic of her and complained about how cold it is. She was conscious of the soft flesh of his fingers on the steering wheel, jealous of their firm grip on something that did not know the right way to appreciate it; she eyed it suspiciously, and breathed a cloud of cold air into his face.
She was disappointed with his eagerness to look outside the window; he seemed faithful that this trip could change something inside them, could touch something within them they did not know were there before. Things did not move according to a story in real life, revelations did not occur within fifty-one minute time spans, your life was not shattered just when you deemed it perfect, not to mention your life was far from perfect. Perfect was neither accessible nor wanted. So she moved back to the front seat and yawned, and then turned on the radio and searched for something melancholic and with a guitar solo, and when she did not find what she wanted, she turned to him swiftly, almost liquid-like, fully aware the despair in her calm would let him know she was expecting him to say something. It was his turn, but now he had molded the curves of his face to an expression she did not recognize, and she was afraid to ask what it meant.
"My grandmother," he said, feeling the spotlight on him and growing slightly nervous, rushed because of it. "Her homemade lemonade. She would pour me a glass of lemonade when I'd visit. I was little."
"How poetic," she said. She had not meant it in a cold manner, although she was afraid it was not what she had been looking for, either.
He shrugged and they traveled for a bit longer, rode along curves and passed through hills until there were no longer trees on the side of the road, until the landscape was non-existant and the radio gave up entirely. When she drove he slept, and when he slept she stopped on the side of the road to watch him a little. His eyebrows were the reason she had taken up on cigarettes, she smoked her cigarettes while she watched his lips, curled outward and begging, always. It made her feel nothing; or it could be something but something that was not desire, or lust, and it was not maternal or forgiving. But the way he placed himself within the car, it was so extremely aesthetic, and for that reason alone, she wanted to make out with him, though she knew inside her that one did not become the thing one kissed. And so when she wanted to make out with him was when she put out her cigarette, holding on to the car with her right arm extended carefully, and stepping on the cigarette butt, she waited, waited to want to take a deep breath, waiting for the memory of breathing to come back to her, and waited, waiting. This is what kept them going when he slept, how uneasy the quiet made her, how painful its stillness was, and how brutally beautiful. The combination of some adjectives made no sense on paper and yet she felt they worked so well together in real life, and the realization was maddening, and carried with itself the urgency of a wake up call.
And so he woke up and she was crying over adjectives that did not belong.
"You are all silence," she told him. She could not seem to talk him out of it.
"You are all death," he told her, well aware she wasn't doing such a good job of dancing it away.
And on the side of the road, their embrace was a whole storyline in itself, though not heartbreaking to a single bird flying above, for they did not know what they missed in their eagerness to fly in the sky and be nothing more than birds. It was the kind of moment you would spend the rest of your life trying to write about in your diary, without luck. She could be wintercoat to him, but for that he would have to accept being a pocket, for that he would have to stop searching for things to fill the void with. Perhaps another bottle of strawberry milk, she thought, right when hundreds of miles away from home, the tears that fell upon the ground sounded too much like waves crashing upon the shore, and he told her the sea sounded like her when she cried, and so she cried more to hear the sea behind the mountains, and she smiled when she saw a resemblance, a smile that kicked the winter out of them. It was imperfect. It was an art piece and like everything else they knew, it was insignificant and exhausting.