Scuttle Buttin'
Demons at bay
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2003
- Posts
- 15,881
Wish I knew you now
Like I knew you then
Like I knew you then
Sometimes life just turned out differently than you expected it to.
It was this thought that continued to run through the mind of Aldo Marin as he drove through the oncoming night. Music played quietly, just enough to be heard over the sound of the road under the tires, miles stretching out behind them, fewer and fewer left in front.
Them.
He had been one-half of 'them' for nearly a baker's dozen worth of years now, and had thought at the beginning of that time that he'd found the woman he'd spend the rest of his life with. There was no question in his mind that she was 'the one.' Aldo and Lucy, and they were perfect together.
Now she rode next to him, their headlights slicing through the growing gloom of evening, the music and the road competing to fill the empty spaces left where conversation used to be. Once upon a time their hands would be together, fingers casually interlaced through the others, and even if they traveled together in silence, it was comfortable.
When had that stopped?
Looking back on it, there was a gradual but unmistakable progression of events. More time spent at work for both of them, fewer meals taken together, less laughter, less surprise, less sex. His fingers used to spend hours sifting through her hair while she lay with her head on his lap, watching a movie, a show, or just the snow falling outside. He wasn't sure now that he even remembered when that last happened. Inches apart they sat now, but it may as well be miles.
She had been his dream, once. Somewhere he had woken up, and life had filled the void left where those dreams used to be, and there seemed to be less and less room for her. For them. Fights started eventually, but the silences were almost worse than the yelling. Hours, days, spent in the same house, the same room, with a person whose existence you didn't even acknowledge.
The breaking point was... well, nothing, really. No one event, no singular occasion that sent them to the point of too much. But with steady pressure, the weight of the water growing heavier and heavier on their heads as they sank together, they reached that end together. Over a simple meal, bowls of pasta, olive oil, some chicken, they sat across from each other and, for the first time in far too long, had a real conversation.
It was that conversation that led them here, driving through the fall dusk to a cabin they had not visited in nearly a year. He had inherited it from his family, a nice chunk of land with a nice-sized cabin built near a fairly secluded freshwater lake. The area was remote enough that dirt roads were all that led to it, and electric and sell service were a thing you escaped from while there. More than once they'd been stuck up there for a bit when heavy rains had washed out the roads or heavy snows had blocked them, but they rarely thought of it as truly being stuck. Much of the time was spent naked, the creak of the bed and the sound of their need drown out only by the crackle of fire or the crash of thunder. More distant memories.
Silence still sat heavy in the air as they bumped down dirt roads, their progression measured as much on the odometer as it was on the dropping bars on their phone. He knew this area like the back of his hand, each twist and turn in the road, each tree that seemed to hang over their path as if threatening to fall at any moment. It was nearly a half hour through thickening woods, but as always they arrived safely.
The headlights were left on so they could ignite some lamps, but first he pulled his phone from the inner pocket of his canvas jacket and powered it down, then slipped it into the center console of the car. It was simply something they did, leaving their phones behind like that. They were useless for any outside communication, but when up here they didn't want to be distracted with the games that lurked on them still. It was symbolic, perhaps, but it still felt like a severing with the rest of the word. Cut the cord, at least for a few days.
With the car off and his door standing open, it was only the sounds of the woods that swirled around them now, and the lack of words between them became impossible to tolerate.
"I'll grab the bags, you get some lights going?" he said with some approximation of a smile in the darkness.
It was what they always did, roles they had just naturally fallen into when they arrived at night for a weekend stay, but she felt so very far away in that moment, and it was the only path he saw that might hold a bridge back to her.
Somewhere.