I'm lying on my bed with the lights out at 11 p.m. on a hazy Wednesday night, music filtering through my headphones. I close my eyes, trying to blot out the slow sound of the cars going by outside my window, and I focus on every note and chord. The drums pound a slow background, and the piano keys clink a small tune at the top of my spine. Each chord rings, each spoken word registers carefully in my blank mind. I try to cleanse my thought, let everything drain out the back of my skull, let each mechanical sound of the music grate like a metal pole scraping slowly across the inside of brain. And yet I still can't get the sound of the car wipers out of my head.
Whump. Whump. Whump.
They were the first sign of the past, their steady, methodical, beating. A kind of music really, a coarse, basic beat, always playing, always repeating. It was an overcast day, the rain slowly pooling on the windshield, being swiped clean by the ever-working wipers. It was always the rainy days that got to me the most.
Whump. Whump. Whump.
The shrapnel of our life is still embedded around my room. Somewhere in my desk there is a picture of you, I put it there a few days after it happened and haven't looked at it since. I still have some of your books on my shelves, your Thoreau, your Emerson. Somewhere in my dark closet your grey and purple hooded sweatshirt you always wore is hanging on one of those blue plastic hangers. The gold necklace I gave you that you left the last time on accident is curled up like a cat on my bedside table. I let the beat of the music fill my ears, seep through my brain, filter out the sediment, but underneath that beat those wipers keep just
Whump, whump, whump
Through my mind. The slow rattle of my car filled the space in between, its heartbeat that is soggy from the laboring rain that has been falling all day. The landscape was decidedly soaked, water dripped like sweat from the leaves of tired trees onto a saturated shoulder. My car was pulled over to the side and the headlights still left a yellowed path through the air, igniting each drop of water into fire. The sky was grey, hardly a trace of direction to notice the sun.
The drops beat themselves across the window, the wipers sweeping them away without a glance. They kept beating a steady
Whump, whump, whump
You used to lie with me here. I still have the same sheets, if that matters. I remember the feel of your body, and your warmth. I remember you, your face, your smile. But the card you made me for my birthday last year is forgotten in the file folders under my bed. The mix CD you made for me is still in the last slot in my CD case, and that is sitting not far from your copy of Walden. I hardly even find it useful to remember what is mine, I only know what was yours. The music is calming, flowing, sweeping through my mind, wiping across it without a second thought but a
Whump, whump, whump
And in the rain I was looking for that old booklet I used to keep all my expenses in, tabulating cost and benefit, the scale and size of my bank account. I don't know why I was looking for it, something in the rain and the grey but I was rummaging through the glove compartment. I hadn't opened that glove box in a while, and now for some reason driving through these old Maine pines on a rainy day I just felt like I needed to.
And the rain keeps beating, the car rattles softly, and the wipers just go back and forth with their
Whump, whump, whump
And I can't seem to cry anymore. I only think. The darkness is satisfying, and it seems to give me air, give me space. I do this every once and a while, when I remember, when I feel bad, when I give in most to the depression. Forgotten also are those meds you wanted me to take. I think I left them in that carved wooden box you made me. The room crouches with the music, it fills my body and leaves me with no physical person, but with sense, with feeling, with a
Whump, whump, whump
And I hadn't opened the glove compartment in so long. Pens, pencils, tissues, my registration, and there was the book, and I grasped it in my hands, felt the green leather and the stenciling, the gold trim. I recalled how proud I was of it so long ago, a symbol of my financial capability and independence, and I was about to crack it open when I looked back in the glove box and remembered.
There was an old picture of us, your brown hair curling in the way it always did, hanging elegantly in the air, and your slender arms curled around my neck. You were trying to kiss me, but I was looking at the camera, and your face was in my hair, I was smiling because just then you whispered in my ear and I heard the
Whump, whump, whump
Sound before I saw you, and I remembered that day, three weeks after the picture was taken. You had gone away for a week, told me you were seeing some family members in Massachusetts, you wanted me to come but I said I wanted to get a surprise for you when you came back. The sky was dark and sullen, and the rain was falling, there was no hint as to the direction of the sun. But I was happy despite it, I was waiting for you at that overlook on coast road, with the sound of the wipers and my car engine eclipsed by the slow pulse of the waves down the cliffside. I didn't care that the rain was eagerly soaking into my jacket, I just thought about you following suit, soaking into my clothes and into me and I would hold you and say that I missed you. And I saw your car come around the corner, and I was elated, and in a momentary lull of the waves the
Whump, whump, whump
Of the wipers could be heard, and I was back in the woods. Under the notebook was the photo, and you whispered into my ear, and I was starting to smile. And I picked up the picture, and then the little box under it, the soft felt box that I remembered feeling in my pocket. And I felt the springs on the box give that slight, perfect resistance, and I looked at the ring. I realized I didn't know why I stopped on the woodland road and why I was looking though the glovebox and all I could hear was the
Whump, whump, whump
And I fingered the felt box in my coat pocket and imagined you slipping your hand in my pocket as you always do when you kiss me and feeling it, and pulling it out. And so I watched your car come around the curve, and I was confused, because you were far enough away that the sound came a second or two after the movement, like a movie that fell out of synch with its audio, and I didn't hear the screech of your brakes until your car was sliding through the wooden fence and over the side of the bluff. Then I heard the crumpling noise of the flimsy wooden fence splintering across the hood of your civic, and I watched in panic as so far away, you plummeted. Then all I heard was the strange
Whump
As your car slid under the waves in the rain. I thought for a second I saw the brown curls of your hair and then I never saw you again.
And so this scene and that noise still plays in my head despite the music as I stare at the white ceiling. And I held that leather book, and remembered, and that photograph, and remembered, and that ring, and remembered that at first I nearly threw it into the water, because you were gone, because I couldn't do anything, and because maybe it would sink beneath the waves like you, and then I thought that I could sink beneath the waves like you too but then I just threw the ring and the box in the glove compartment instead.
And I looked in that leather book and I see that the last thing I wrote before I left it in the glove box was: Ring! It's a lot, but I don't care because I love you. And so I read those words when I was parked on the side of the road in the woods in the rain, and I think it was enough to send me as far deep into missing you that I possibly could. And then I was just sitting in my car in silence and just listened to the
Whump, whump, whump
of the windshield wipers playing through my mind. And so I was lying on my bed and realized the last track stopped a while ago, there is no music but the sound of your brakes, the crash of the wood, and the subtle, ever so subtle splash of you disappearing from the world forever, and the whump, whump, whump of the wipers setting the beat impassively as I watched the waves.
And then, instead of those noises, I feel your face in my ear, Your arms around my neck, your waist in my hands, and I am looking at the camera and your lips are whispering into my ear. And I can't hear the whump, whump, whump of the wipers anymore because all I can hear is you whispering, whispering ever so lightly in my ear, that you love me.
Written September 16th, 2010, 11:15 PM
Revised September 17th, 2010, 3:30 PM
By Ben Chamberlain
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