Keep Me in the Dark

I can still remember how it felt to be there, parked beside the lake, on the way to meet my new landlord, not really sure why we had pulled over. He sat in the driver seat his long arms stretched over the wheel gesturing the darkness, I sat there hypnotized my breath, fogging up the windshield. We barely knew each other, he was older, and someone that had suddenly landed in my life, someone I had let in before it was too late. I was 23 a single parent, raising my infant son with my girlfriend. The way we had mad, through a mutual friend, seemed innocent enough. He started working at the same restaurant as me and my girlfriend, Jen, he latched onto us pretty quickly. He was a self-described crotchety, gay man, an even though I knew he was kind of difficult based on how he treated others we worked with, he made me feel special. He fawned over me like a brother, or even a father, by praising my sharp sense of humor always telling me how beautiful I was. I guess I really needed that back then, newly out to my family of origin, and desperately longing for a relationship with my own estranged father. He said things like “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you. I wish you loved yourself the way I love you.“ Now that I look back I can see the danger clearly because I was vulnerable, so available for any kind of attention that felt like love. I didn’t know then that might need to rescue him stemmed from such a deep wound that would take decades to acknowledge and try to heal. We had this in common. He had told me stories about his extremely abusive childhood in a way that immediately one me over to his side before I even considered that maybe he was a predator. As we sat there in the car I started to reflect on how he seem to know his power over me. I think I began associating, trying to really hear what he wants to say, trying to listen without judgment. His large hands gripped the wheel as he took a deep breath and sighed .

“I wanna tell you something that happened years ago that still haunts me, and I hope you can forgive me for what I’m about to say.” His voice trailed off as he turned towards the windshield looking into the woods with a strange intensity. He was struggling to continue so I gently reached over towards him and put my hand on his shoulder.

“I’m listening.” I said with as much openness that I could conjure in the moment where I felt flooded with fear. For a few minutes time seemed to stop, as he stared ahead. The lake behind us silent and deceptively calm. The way we both became simultaneously stiff only added to the tension in the small Honda civic, I was extremely aware of how close our bodies were, how unfamiliar that part of the city was, and how I had to keep calm

in order to move us through this moment.

His voice was noticeably cold and emotionless as he began to speak, and a sharp chill ran all

over my skin, my heart pounding in my head. Whatever he needed to say was going to change everything, that was certain.

”A friend of mine was murdered here years ago.” He said this to the canopy of pines to the nothingness that was the space outside of the car. I felt myself go cold, reminding myself it was Fall on the east coast, that I was just getting acclimated to the temperature dropping, but deep down inside in a place that was crying out RUN AWAY told me that my desire to escape was my instinct pulling me into reality. But instead of jumping out of the car, running into the pitch blackness of a moonless night, I say there and kept my eyes on the trees, kept my promise to listen.

“She was so beautiful, he continued, she reminds me of you with her big eyes and amazing laugh. She was my best friend and then she was gone.” As he said these last words he let them sink into the space between us. Gone. Murdered. Best friends. Like you. I let the words in and tried not to think about them, knowing I would examine them later, take them apart and put them under my own microscope and try to figure out why now, why tonight, what did it all mean?

“I know she had her whole life ahead of her, she was a writer, and so many people loved her, and I would have done anything for her. Just like I would do for you.” I was aware that because he had been shuffling between places , staying on our couch until something became available, I had no way of getting away from him, not even on my home. So I say there and waited for the next part, praying that he would turn the car back on and we would drive to my new house without any more troubling disclosures. Instead, he turned to me and looked me in the eyes as he said,

“So many people blamed me, thought that I killed her, even though she meant everything to me. I couldn’t deal so obviously I left, went out to San Francisco and tried to make sense of it all. I mean what else is there to do when your favorite person on the planet is stabbed to death and dumped like garbage in the woods? I mean they found her right over there.” He pointed into the nothingness with a certainty that gave me a prickly feeling in my spine.

“I would never let anything like that happen to , as long as I’m alive, but you know my health is not so great, and my body is rejecting all the medicines…”

After he died years later I recall saying nothing as a way of not having to hear any more, as a way to push him into action, to go to the appointment, to stay the course. I thought if I showed and amount of accusation he would turn into the monster, the one who could so easily say those horrifying words with no emotion inside of his eyes. I thought of my son who needed me to be brave and I thought of myself as the person he needed to confess to. All these years later I remember wanting to ask “So did you do it George??”

but then what would happen if he had? We were trapped out there in under the spell of the past, both triggered into his grief, or maybe just his obsession with winning me over to his side with this perverse intimacy. I had his secret, just the parts he wanted me to know, and I knew better than to take the dare and question him.

We drove away with barely a sound. I was holding my breath and he was smoking a cigarette, flicking the orange ash out the window, as I kept still and focused on the next destination.

I told myself it will be okay. It will

be okay. But now he’s been dead for over a decade, his confession still hanging on inside of me. I never knew if anyone else was even aware of this unspoken truth, and I never found out if he was in fact a killer. I told myself that night it’s better that I don’t know. It’s better if I don’t ever bring it up again. In the shadows we can keep these words safe, let them hang in the atmosphere and settle in the water that seemed to watch us sitting there so long ago. I would carry this with me for every day for the rest of my life, never knowing the truth about his darkness.

my family of origin.