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My head is pressed up against the passenger side window when my mind is conscious enough to be able to feel my nerves. By the time I open my eyes, my hands have stopped being numb, and my back and neck hurt from the awkward angle that I fell asleep in. Everything outside the glass is gray; the field the car is parked in is full of gray grass and weeds, the trees lining the field are gray, the sky is even filled with nothing but gray clouds, casting shadow across the world where no sunlight would enter for fear of being swallowed up by darkness. The window starts to get foggy from my warm breath against it, and I turn my head away, trying to coat the inside of my dry mouth with saliva because I suddenly find myself thirsty, even though I know there is nothing to drink inside the car. I stretch my neck around, trying to take out the ache, but the gesture is futile. It will stay with me until I am able to walk around a bit, and even then it probably won't go away until I can get a full nights rest on a comfortable mattress in a nice warm room. But that won't happen anytime soon, but I'm okay with that. I knew it would be like this when I let him take me away, and I accepted it. Running away always sounds glamorous when you haven't done it, because you think that it solves all your problems, but you never stop to think that maybe it's not the way out that you wanted, maybe there was another decision to have been made, but by the time you think of it you're already sitting in the backseat of a car with no gas, in the middle of a field that's in the middle of nowhere, the temperature steadily dropping even as the sun rises behind an army of gray clouds. When a chill runs down my spine, I realize how cold I am. I try not to shake, but it doesn't work, and my whole body starts to shiver slightly. I wonder if maybe we will die out here, today; freeze to death because there's no gas to make the heat work, and our bodies have long lost the last ounce of warmth that we once possessed. Or maybe we'll just starve, because neither of us thought through anything enough to bring some food or water, and I don't really want to go out like that because its a long time to suffer, and I don't him to suffer. Especially since I haven't found the courage to tell him that I love him yet, and for him to die while he still thinks that I don't love him with my whole heart would be a tragedy, because I do. I really do. My eyes start to sting with the tears that are building up, but I don't want them to fall, because I just have this feeling that they'll freeze on my face, and then this pain inside me won't even matter because there will be no tears to show it. I know I am being irrational, that I'm only freaking out, but the fear has taken a hold of my brain and I can't stop. I look out the window again, thinking that it looks even darker than it did a minute ago. I feel lifeless because nothing can survive in the gray. The world is devoid of feeling, sucking out any pigment, wrapping me in the void it leaves behind, and I find myself sinking deeper into the shadows, into the gray. But then his hand finds my cheek, his fingertips run along my jaw as he asks me if I'm cold, but I don't answer, I just look at him, because there's something different, and I can't figure out what it is. He doesn't wait for me to answer, though. He lifts his head from where it rested on my thigh and sits up next to me, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me so I'm sitting on his lap, holding onto me tightly while he rubs my limbs, my back, anywhere his hands can reach to try and create some heat. I raise my face to meet his, and he smiles at me, his white teeth peeking from between red lips, and then those same red lips are on mine, and his warm pink tongue is bringing mine back to life, and I'm holding onto his soft black hair because I feel that familiar feeling of falling, but, oh, it's different, better, and when he pulls back and smiles at me again, I look into his hazel eyes and see them gazing back at me, and it's then that I realize what is different. At this I smile back at him, because his smiles are just so infectious that I can't resist. He's running his hands over my lower back now, and I find I am no longer shivering from the cold. I wrap my arms around his neck and lay my chin on his shoulder, looking out the back window at the world. And it doesn't seem to matter anymore that the world outside is gray. "I love you." In my world of gray, he is the only thing with color, glittering and sharp. |