I’m sure you could have seen us in the dusty distance, in a blue Pontiac, two figures with more years of experience than I have, in the back.
Him and Me in the front.
Anyone who would have seen us this way would have thought we are a happy couple with parents in law on our way to where the sky is as matt blue as the car.
Anyone who would have spoken with him would know we are.
Anyone who would have spoken with me would know we are, left with a feeling of unexplainable uncertainty.
I saw too late that soon a chance will open up, just like it did with Anna.
What He did…with her I don’t find out.
The garage where we stopped for his last act was rusty, as expected when driving into a hangar without doors.
What was I supposed to do after we came to a halt?
He got out and already before he shut the door with his usual gentleness, the threat in his eyes urged me out the car as well.
He was careless, this time. Anticipation dancing on his skin.
Only as an echo my ears received how he voiced his ever so innocent sounding plan, and he took a second longer, so that I heard myself saying to a young engineer with short red hair:
Call the police!
As if he understood my almost accepted fate one look was enough for him to wander off without further questions.
I could have been in serious trouble if anyone began asking about why I was with him.
His hard pupils eyed me with a need of control.
That was his final mistake: the comfort he started to experience for the first time again, after Anna.
While we were caught in our mystical eyeball bond for a moment, the couple got out their blue deathbed.
It’s nothing. Only a car wash. You can go back and sit inside.
So, they did.
His voice seemed clearer again.
Trust has always been a dangerous matter, especially for the innocent.
Without an emotion, like care, we met in the little garage office.
With cars he was a bit like a child going to the zoo.
No touch. Too much attention.
And when he couldn’t feel that I share the same satisfaction but stared into the distance instead, he asked: What is it?
The same genuine voice, that asked the favour from the boy, answered: I miss Anna.
Me too.
Breakfast jam from two mornings ago boiled in my stomach.
While we stood back in the open dust to wait for the gas to rest forever in their lungs, meticulously covered by a soap-water-mix, my eyes raced between the open road and him.
Maybe he knew what I did, without guilt we both were.
The fear of losing his freedom could never keep him from moments of pleasure, moments like this.
I listened for the sirens.
There were none, only a shadow that soon spat out four men who didn’t make a rhyme of my words out of my moth that even I could not understand.
They did though.
They understood what the two bodies in the car meant, the smoke and no breadth.
Not even in handcuffs he was able to release all the anger which instead he found another way to free.
Movements in his brown eyes yelled at me.
The contrast between silence and unspoken shouts tore my soul to pieces, and in his world I was a friend.
A friend who betrayed a childhood secret.
Only years later a typewriter revealed what he truly felt, if anything like truth at all.
In various sizes the letters I received spoke of failure, freedom and that he wants to visit me one last time.
Nothing frightened me, just this one thing: our bond.