Darkness Hides Your Broken Pieces

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Trigger Warning: Death, alcohol use  

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Summer erases what you used to be, packs bags of long-lost truth 

Sunrise kills immortality, matures a wasted youth 

For seven years, you haven't stopped running. 

At sixteen, you stopped looking back. A product of spite and apathy and the American South, you could've had things so much worse. Still, you made the choice that a different life would be better, and after seven years, you're still waiting for the proof. 

During high school junior year your best friend's couch became your bed, his house your bedroom, until you outgrew it and so did he. At eighteen you and your best friend took to the streets, a two-person band, and headed west with guitars on your shoulders and optimism a roadmap crushed in your back pocket. 

You hitched a ride. You hopped a train. You busked. Traveled, slept, repeated. No lather and rinse for miles around. You met others, and lost them again, let them fade as freely as passing thoughts before falling asleep. 

Six months ago you and your best friend picked up Savannah outside Seattle, and those next six months together you rode across the world—gripping open-bottom suicide cars, the earth a blur beneath the precarious balance of your feet, waiting past the razor-wired depot fences to catch out at one a.m., heading wherever the rails decided to take you. 

Now you stand, a dirt-covered mirror of the girl across from you, beside the tracks in a train yard just outside of Phoenix, the first rays of sunset seeping over the cactus scrub and golden waves of grass. On the ground before you lays the body of your best friend. 

Savannah listened, bystander, as the argument between you and your best friend devolved from whose extra dollar was tossed into the kick down pool for the liquor store—and who, then, was rewarded the extra shots—into a full-blown fistfight over who was greedier. You knew it was you. Savannah was the one who, once the silence lulled, handed you the knife she'd expected you to hold for self-protection. She was the one who watched as you turned it on your best friend. Still she watches the blade shudder nervously in your hand. Savannah doesn't need to ask what happened. 

But you, Otter—through the haze of overreaction and time-warped perception lingering from about three too many hits of the flat vodka pint tucked behind your waistband—you should ask yourself what happened. 

"Otter," Savannah says now, as quick and light as when she tried on your nickname the first night in Olympia. 

You'd held up the back of your dominant hand, a photoreal tattoo of the animal looking out, immortalized in ink beneath your skin. "When I was a kid I'd sleep with m'hands up under my chin," you'd explained the moniker, "and so it stuck." 

You'd given her half of your sun-stale beer and watched her pick off the chords to "Never Whole Again" on your thrift-store Gibson six-string and you knew she'd go with you all the way. 

Summer erases what you used to be, packs bags of long-lost truth 

Sunrise kills immortality, matures a wasted youth 

The sunset shapes who you choose to become, deserts the road back home

Night showcases emptiness, you walk this life alone 

You stare down to the body of your best friend. You breathe desert air through the smoke in your lungs. You aren't smelling the grime caked through the bandana beginning to strangle against your throat. You don't give notice to the late summer breeze rippling beneath your cutoff tee, a superficial comfort on your sunburned skin. You don't feel the grease long soaked through what remains of your jeans and the remake of patches over their entirety (save for the new blots of blue denim you and Savannah each added to your knees, with spare time and sloppy stitches late last night). You just stare down. 

"Well, we can't just leave him," you shout, Doppler-ringing the silence that follows. A reminder of hearing damage from the brakes, brassy and tight? Your own volume, unnecessary to be understood? "Can we?" you plead. The tracks and the engine and the cement beneath your boots aren't ever listening. 

Savannah bites at her thumbnail, her lip, plays catch-and-release with the silver piercing at the side of her mouth. You look her over, bleached highlights of her half-tied hair hanging like a ghost forgotten, tangled strands of white and pale blue wash-out straying over black, lost in the night. 

Stray, lost—both of you are. 

"What am I supposed to do?" you reiterate. "Sav, what do I do?" 

"I don't know," she steps back, a trepidation you've never seen before, breaking through with an inward hunch of her shoulders, a flinch as she blinks against your tone. Her tears come, belated, borne by off-guard realisation far more than through grief. Her burn-peeling cheeks streaked with dirt and eyeliner are painted by two white, clean lines. 

"What did you even do? What did you do to us?" Savannah asks. To your band? Your buddies? To yourself, and the girl across from you? What did you do to your best friend? 

"I didn't mean to, how was it my fault?" you don't believe for even a second. "He didn't believe me." 

You still grip the knife handle tight in your palm, tacky with sweat, blood, and sun-decayed plastic. A burning floods up through your empty stomach. Your best friend wanted to donate the kick down total of $12.87 to dinner for all, no food for two days and no time for flying ratty cardboard-and-Sharpie signs—"HUNGRY", "HEADED WEST", "ANYTHING HELPS"—before waiting at the freight yard to catch out. 

If you had agreed without insisting it go for vodka—"It's my extra buck, I get the final say"—then tonight you would have been cold, like always, and awake, like always, but fed and whole. Like always. You, Savannah, your best friend, would have been whole. 

"He didn't believe me." You swing a punch at nothing. You swing again, this time releasing the knife and the blade clatters to the gravel six feet to your left. You tug down your shirt collar and wipe your nose on whatever cutoff remains of your sleeve. Otter, are you crying? "I didn't mean to. I didn't." But, didn't you? 

Savannah picks up her backpack from beside the chain link fence, slowly, painfully deliberate. "You killed him. Killed," she stresses, as if perhaps if she shows you how very real this is, you'll somehow erase it, take it back, spray paint it over. Black it out, rewind, walk backward until you can't see it anymore. 

"I—" You can't decide whether to shout or swear or let yourself disappear into the soil, another gutterpunk ghost fading into the sunset. It all comes out a garbled, agonizing yell. "How can you blame me when I didn't mean to?" 

She backs away again. "It's still your fault! You can say it was an accident, but it doesn't mean I won't blame you!" 

You don't respond. You dig in your pockets and light a cigarette. Through the smoke and the rush in your lungs you look at your palms, stained and blotched with a thick coat of human blood. The otter tattoo on the back of your hand smiles out streaked, marred, unrecognisable beneath the red. 

You killed more than just your best friend, lying on the ground in front of you, in a train yard in Phoenix just before dusk. You slaughtered Savannah's trust. You murdered your future. Murderer. 

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You won't notice how late it's become until the train sets into motion some fifty feet away. You will turn first as the horn lances the dusk, then Savannah. The volume will be enveloping, devastating. It will cocoon you from all thought for one final, blissful moment. Then you will realise you're too far away. Before you can move, you will already be too late. 

You will step over my body, that of your best friend, like a plaything left abandoned, painted crimson in a train yard, dark and shapeless in the coming night. You won't make it to the open boxcar, to the vanishing point of your escape ever tracking the horizon. 

You will try to forget me. You won't. You will keep trying. 

You will run to catch up. You can't. You will keep running. 

Summer erases what you used to be, packs bags of long-lost truth 

Sunrise kills immortality, matures a wasted youth 

The sunset shapes who you choose to become, deserts the road back home

Night showcases emptiness, you walk this life alone 

The darkness hides you in it, darkness holds your sin

Darkness hides your broken pieces, never whole again