You leave the lights on when you close the door, ostensibly so that your now-ex will be able to see coming home in the dark, but really to run up the electricity bill, which you will no longer have to pay. You are past master of this kind of duplicitous, petty manipulation, though only you know how good you are. You wish you could change.
Everything you own—one box and one suitcase—fills the Geo’s trunk with no room to spare, or for a spare, which you don’t have anyway, so you hope you don’t get a flat. You never learned how to change a tire, much to your now-ex’s disgust. And the roadside assistance is in your now-ex’s insurance policy, which no longer includes you. You will have to ask your sister for insurance as well as houseroom. You can feel the dipping levels of her respect.
You sigh, start the car, and set off across the beige desert miles, so flat and straight that you think you can see the edge of the world, although you know it ends in mountains that your little car will shudder to climb. You run the a/c in five-minute bursts, hoping to save gas. The further you get from Albuquerque, the sparser the strip malls along the way, replaced by sporadic adobe towns. You stop for gas and tacos. You wish you could pair them with tequila. You wish that you were an alcoholic, so that you could actually forget.
Night drops early and deep. You find yourself in sudden solitary darkness; everyone else in the world, it seems, is home. If you called your ex and said this, with tears in your voice, your ex might tell you to turn around, but you know that would just lead to self-hatred for you both, and you would be back on this road soon enough.
Just as you near the desert’s edge, the tacos begin to grind through you. You know that there is nothing nearby. You are a speck in the great blank expanse. You realize that you will not make it to the next exit. You pull off the asphalt into the sand and wish you had even a cactus for cover. For the second time in a year, you are expelling everything inside you onto the open desert floor, wishing you could change.
You reach your sister’s little adobe house in Taos. You are relieved to see the silvery wind chimes and turquoise suncatchers that dangle from the open doorway where she stands, a silhouette in the amber rectangle of light. You have not called ahead, so she has no excuse at hand to refuse you. She wouldn’t, though. You know this. The truth is that you could not have borne her disappointment over the phone, but you are used to the sight of you being enough to spur sympathy.
Instead, she tells you that your ex called, which is why she is awake and dressed and waiting for you. You shrug and sigh and offer to try to explain. She shakes her head and lets you in. You close your eyes and listen to the sound of her bare footsteps, the swish of the cotton shawl she wears, the clink of her rings against the bottle she pulls from a cabinet. You are safe. She invites you to sit at her kitchen table and offers you a shot of tequila. You decline and tell her that what you really need is a shower, on account of your unscheduled rest stop in the desert.
“Oh, little one, again?” She reaches over and uses her be-ringed thumb to stroke your eyebrows. “Isn’t this enough already?”
You shrug. You don’t cry. Tears would wring more sympathy, maybe more money, you know, but just now, you do not have the heart. She makes you drink a cup of herbal tea and tells you that she is afraid you will fall face-forward and drown if you try to shower now. You lug your suitcase back to the spare bedroom. You fall, fully clothed, onto the quilt your mother made. You sleep like someone who has driven through the desert.
You awaken, suffocating, heaviness pressing on your chest. You panic, then realize that your sister’s cat has taken up residence. The great somnolent beast has folded its weight onto your sternum. You debate rolling over. You almost chuckle, imagining its look of surprise if you abruptly dislodge it. You don’t. See, you think to yourself. I am ready. I am changing. You go back to sleep.
Cold dawn light spills through the window when you wake again. The cat opens its eyes, blinks in regal disdain, turns around and settles back into sleep, swishing its tail against your nose. Even this moment, you realize, even this stale moment with a face full of cat butt is not rock bottom. This is not the end. You have so much further to fall.
Shinelle L. Espaillat teaches at Dutchess Community College in New York. Her work has appeared in the collections How Higher Education Feels: Commentaries on Poems That Illuminate Emotions in Learning and Teaching and Shale: Extreme Fiction for Extreme Times, as well as in Minerva Rising, Ghost Parachute, The Westchester Review, Cleaver Magazine and Midway Journal.