Rip it all to shreds and Let it Go

The clear night darkened as I drove, then turned to rain. How typical for a night like this. The windsheild wipers were valient, but they couldn’t reach all the problems clouding my head.

When I drive alone I tend to think entirely too much.

We always play “questions,” Jessa and I, whenever we find ourselves bored. The first question one of us usually pitches at the other is “if you could be anywhere right now, where would you be?” Once in awhile, the answer is “here,” and that’s when you know life is perfect.

The last time I’d asked her, fending off a grey day and English class, she’d said -with Chris.

Chris is our childhood friend who moved to Eugene in seventh grade for reasons we apparently hadn’t been old enough to know at the time. Whenever our orchestra trips landed us there we’d stop and visit, and no matter how long the pauses between visits were, there was still friendship waiting for us to come back to in that house.

A truck with a single headlight passed me on the other side of the concrete barrier.

“Sex!” I called out, hitting the ceiling out of habit, mimicking the motions of my memory.

Jessa was mine in so many ways, just as she always had been. A kid has to have a family, somewhere, and Mark and I had long ago appointed ourselves hers. Mark, especially, protected her like she was his own. The other boys all came and went, looked at her too quickly and saw only what they thought they would. That’s how she became sloppily mislabeled; Ditz. Soft-core slut.    

None of them would ever know her. They’d never get to see her in those stolen moments of freedom when she came alive. At concerts, the beach, assorted places she loved because they were outside of her world, she really smiled, and it made her beautiful under her make-up. Chris’ house was one of those places where she took sanctuary from all of life, one of her perfect hidden spots.

Now I was approaching her safe house. Hopefully. I was betting on my gut and trusting the hints she’d given me, since I knew I wasn’t what she was hiding from.

Chris’ house crawled from memories and onto the street in front of me quicker than I’d expected, and smaller than I’d remembered. There was no surprise on his face when he opened the faded blue front door. He just quietly led me upstairs toward his room. The traditional friendly greeting of “what’s up?” seemed inadequate, so I let the silence be comfortable.

As we neared the door, it was Jessa’s voice that broke the stillness.

“A month and four days,” she said. It cut off all the questions foaming in my mind.

I stepped into the room and her blue eyes were just as I'd left them.

A month and four days is all she would have to wait, she explained, until her eighteenth birthday. On that day she would no longer be a run away. For the first time and forever she would legally be her own person, not the property of her father. And she would be free. Chris had set her up with a job and if she could just lay low until then everything would be alright.

She almost convinced me that it would.

In my head one question wrestled it’s way to the top over all the others. “What was the one last thing you’d been staying for?” I asked.

“You.”

“I was right yesterday in the car,” she began to explain. “I knew it was coming because my life isn’t allowed to be that good for that long interrupted. You have to come down sometime. So something had to follow, I just didn’t know it would be this.”

She looked timid, a word I had never associated with her. I realized, though, I was probably a strange reminder of the world she’d just escaped.  

“It hit me as soon as I got home from the beach. My dad was waiting for me wearing the look I’ve always been afraid of. While I was gone he went through my drawers and found the cigarettes, and well, you know how he is...”

I did, quite well enough. I knew that she got grounded for getting a single B or for missing her early curfew by minutes, so I didn’t want to imagine what his punishment was for something that was actually illegal.

“I shouldn’t have tried to keep souvenirs from a dream,” she laughed softly, the way you do when it’s not funny. “We were so close to escaping the seventeenth too.

“In his all-powerful logic, I had been with you the past few days, so my scandalously rebellious behavior must have come from you. He figured either you gave me the cigarettes or forced me to have them, and have you ever known that man to listen to reason? I flat-out told him that they were MY cigarettes, that I had them because I had wanted to smoke. Not because anyone had raped my health with peer pressure, but because I made a decision and I wanted to. He called me a liar with no back bone, trying to protect my friends, and banned me from seeing you since you’re such a ‘horrible influence’ on me.”

Friendship is supposed to be one of those untouchable abstracts like beauty or love that can never be banned or killed. But her dictator exiled her from ours.

“So here we are,” I said, stating the obvious as I tried to grasp and straighten out what I’d just heard.
We were all shaking of weariness and the unknown, and I remembered that I still had my extra cigarettes, the villains behind all of this, tucked safely away in my glasses case. There were only two so we shared, just one more way the three of us were tied together.

It had only been a day since I saw Jessa last, but so much had changed already. Her eyes were clearer and when she smiled, though weary with effort, she was the freest I’ve ever seen. Relaxing in an overstuffed chair, I could sense the peace in her posture and tone, and I knew that Chris, for one, would get to see more than just glimpses of the Jessa only a few of us knew.

I’d found her, the gold I’d been chasing down the rainbow, just to turn around and desert my prize. Not that I was surprised; I hadn’t come to claim her back, for in spite of my selfishness I couldn’t do that to her. That’s why I couldn’t bring Mark. He was so set on “rescuing” her he would have only stolen her out of freedom.  I knew that bringing her back to us meant forcing her back into everything else as well.  Now the only thing I could do was enjoy the last drag of calmness on the dwindling cigarettes, then watch the embers, unwilling to admit they were finished, just garbage now.

I asked our traditional question and let it serve as a farewell.

“If you could be anywhere right now...?”

“Here,” Jessa was steady and certain.

That was all I needed to know.



I left and headed back towards her abandoned jail cell. Thankfully, the night had cleared a path for me, because the day had been so long I didn’t have the strength to battle rain.

When I wake up tomorrow I’ll have those few minutes of innocence and ignorance, before I remember what I’ve just sleepwalked through. I’ll stretch and admire the morning and everything will be all right. So as I drive, away from Chris and Jessa and everything I wish I could stay with, I tell myself; just live for those few minutes.