Expiation

The earth doesn’t curve like it’s supposed to. 

It’s infuriating. It’s degrading. It shouldn’t have mind enough to reject something so innate about its structure, yet here you are, watching the unendingly flat pavement pass under your feet as you walk on. You should feel like you’re going down a never-ending slope towards a rock bottom that’ll never come. You should feel as though you’re stuck to a planet, rather than stuck on an eternal chessboard. 

You don’t, however. You don’t feel any of these things because you can’t.  

(Interesting. Why can’t you feel it, little one? What’s different today that wasn’t yesterday?) 

Your shoes make an odd sound when you walk. They’re a brown leather jump boot that you don’t quite remember buying. Did your mother get them for you during the holidays? Last Christmas was a nightmare. Even if you wanted to remember it all, you wouldn’t be able to get past the scrutinizing gaze your aunt gave you from across the table. Her eyes were a frightening blue. Why did they have to be so big? Bigger than tennis balls. Or maybe ping pong balls. Ping pong balls and tennis balls aren’t all that different, are they? Whatever. Either way, it would’ve taken years of inbreeding to create eyes like that. One could only guess which branch of the family had a fetish for familial relations.  

The air was cold. A light fog drifted in the air and stuck to your hair unattractively. You couldn’t see farther than five feet in front of you. If you thought about it hard enough, you could imagine no world existing outside of your little five-foot radius. Things would be easier if the universe could start and end at the end of your eyesight. 

 (It’s always foggy this time of year.) 

A mourning dove cried out somewhere nearby. You used to hate mourning doves. They haunted your morning walks to the bus stop when you were twelve. Your winter coat never kept you warm enough when you were twelve. Your favorite dog died when you were twelve. Your father used to bring that dog to walk you to the bus stop. He’d wag his little tail and yap at the bus until it drove away, and then he’d try to chase it down the road. You couldn’t risk ever letting him off leash. 

Numb. You noticed your fingers losing feeling in the cold. You rubbed them together to warm them. You noticed that the skin on your hands was very dry.  

  (Perhaps it was the obsessive handwashing.) 

Mandy had insisted it wasn’t necessary, but you never listened to her anyway. Who was she, anyway, other than the woman in the cubicle across from yours? She didn’t know what was good for you. She was a bitch. She left out a dish of mints “for visitors” and then ate half of them herself. She had bad taste in classical music. Mandy was going to get sick one of these days. You, on the other hand, could touch your face with reckless abandon, and no illness could reach you.  

You looked up, as if in a daze. You were overcome with the sudden feeling that you should’ve taken a right a few minutes ago. Or…. or was it a left? Left. Left, towards…. where were you headed again? Hm. The concrete under your feet hadn’t changed color or pattern and the air around you remained still, so you assumed you were alright for now.  

(Keep moving forward.)  

 It was always foggy this time of year, anyway. 

You were late to work a few days ago.  

No…. A week ago. 

(Years. It was years ago.)  

 You were never late to work before. The line at the gas station till was longer than you’d expected. You’d left some papers in the printer tray the night previous, promising to yourself you’d pick it up first thing in the morning. You were always the first one to work, so you figured it wouldn’t matter. By the time you arrived, your papers were gone. Instead, an article titled “Talking to Plants: Hippie Propaganda or Certifiable Science?” lay idly in the tray. You turned it over in your hands a few times. 

“Hey, thanks for picking that up for me,” a voice beckoned. Ruby from Marketing took the paper from your hands and gave you a smile. She had a very pretty smile. In the moment, you felt reassured in assuming your papers in the tray wouldn’t matter. Had you assumed they would, you wouldn’t be here, in front of the printer, with Ruby from Marketing. She turned out to be a pretty good kisser.  

 (You must let that go now.) 

The fog around you seemed to have gotten thicker. Had you been breathing much, you would’ve felt as though it was suffocating.  Somehow, the cooing of the mourning dove had gotten slower. Where was that even coming from? You squinted up into the fog, but you couldn’t see any trees. You didn’t even feel their shadows looming over you. Maybe you’d passed them all. 

(Endless concrete. Endless fog. A lone mourning dove, repeating its lament. Seems all very normal to me. Why aren’t you paying attention?) 

Ruby had such pretty eyes. You used to tell her so, every night before dinner. Blue like the ocean. Ocean so deep, Ruby Ray. She never seemed to believe you. Maybe it’s because you used to precede the compliment with a ridiculous squeal and an over-dramatized pat on the cheek. She liked your oddities, but you didn’t. There was almost always a wall between you and yourself.  

That wasn’t something she needed to know. You’d simply hold her from behind and watch her push the chicken around the frying pan. If she was content with you, maybe you could be content with you, too. 

(It could never be that easy, you know that by now.) 

It was foggy outside, the morning that Ruby left you. It’d been a long time coming and you both knew it, though that’s not to say it was unavoidable. It wasn’t. Not even close. 

 (I’d been you) 

Unlike what you’d thought and said to her as she packed her things,  

(that’d driven the love out of your relationship.)  

It’d been you, a terror to your mutual friends and unpleasant to the in- laws. You’d been jealous, you’d been possessive, you’d been insatiably insecure; not her. The front door slammed shut behind her with the sound of your own thoughts screaming in the echo of the slam. 

Ruby wasn’t the first you hurt. It was your brother before her. You were an ignorant child. Your mother used to call you such. You didn’t care for others, and you never played with him. You were much older than him, so when you were well into your self-absorbed teenage years, he was at the age where a sibling’s attention was the holiest thing a kid his age could receive. Your ignorance of him placed you as the unloving God in his universe. Such a thing couldn’t be shaken easily. 

 (Perhaps that’s why he stopped answering your calls.) 

At this point, you knew something was wrong. You’d been walking for much longer than you were supposed to. For the first time that you could remember, you stopped. 

Things became quieter then. The sound of the wind in your ears died out completely and that god-awful sound your shoes made ceased. It was disturbing. For whatever reason, you’d expected a sort of low hum to come from the mist. There was no such noise. 

You took a few long steps to your left. You did not step off the edge of the sidewalk and onto the road like you’d assumed you would; instead, you were met with the same gray slab of concrete as before.  

That’s all it was. Concrete and fog, ceaselessly. No matter how far you ran in any direction, it’s all you could see, all you could feel. It invaded your sinuses like chloroform. Concrete, fog. Concrete, fog. Concrete, fog. There wasn’t even a solitary tree for the mourning dove to nestle into. 

(It’d been foggy, that night in September that you died. By then, you hadn’t seen Ruby for three decades. You still had her picture up on the mantle. Isn’t that a joke? Even then, you didn’t understand. You were never a demon or a tyrant by any means, but   you were something equally as bad; you were unconcerned.) 

You wanted to fall to the ground, to weep and thaw in confusion, but you knew the ground would not greet you like you wanted it to. 

“I don’t understand,” you called out, to no one in particular. No one answered, just like it had been doing since you first started walking. 

(Continue on. Keep moving forward. We can talk this out, you and I. We can start over. I’ll teach you what you were and never became, and maybe then you’ll see past the fog.) 

You stopped, you nodded, and you sighed. You marched forth.  

(Perhaps we can be friends.)