We were always driving in my car. You never took the wheel. The billboards never scared me. They taught me nothing of the world. At night I read about the galaxies and traced constellations to connect the freckles on your arms. The world was burning, but not where we were.
So we kept driving. At night I lay flat on my stomach on motel beds or your friend’s floors. The sky turned orange and it hurt to breathe, but elsewhere it was worse.
And I still liked you. You fucked me in the morning and tucked me into bed. I always begged like a child in anything that I did. We stopped listening to the news and put on Bruce Springsteen instead. The highways were crowded. There were still people going to work. I remember stopping at a store in this one city, and seeing a woman coughing, her pantsuit coated with a greasy sheen. She had an iced coffee in her hand.
But baby we were born–whatever. It was probably November the last time my brother called. Great Salt Lake had finally gone dry. There was no plan for the arsenic clouds the dust storms would bring.
Around the same time, you had to get your brake pads changed. The man said he was jealous. He asked how we could afford not to work.
“It’s easy when your father was a robber.”
“Like a bank thief?” he asked you.
“Like a CEO.”
I pitied the grime on his face.
We got bored of songs that seemed hopeful, so we switched to audio books. I consumed simplified science like dessert. Like sweetness. Like it mattered at all.
After a few months people stopped working at the gas stations. The pumps still worked. We’d run out of friends who answered our calls, so motels or the tent were what we had.
From what I could figure from overheard newscasts, most of the Great Basin and Mojave deserts were now uninhabitable. It had happened quickly, in a matter of weeks.
My family all were probably dead. We kept driving east.
You were uninterested in my sorrow. You told me to get used to it, like you. You touched me less and less.
Still, it was romance. Still, we laughed.
Our favorite books were from thirtyish years ago. Back then it was all clearly going to shit, but authors still spoke with hope. We were in the middle of one about melting sea ice when we finally got to the coast. Most of the motel rooms had stopped having workers in the lobby, installing card readers on the door. Self check-in like a vending machine. You still had so much money in the bank. You never quite answered what we were going to do now that we were at the end.
We both began coughing, but for me it was worse. We tried the doctor, but were met with waiting rooms filled with bodies on the floors. You said you’d seen this as a kid, that there was a virus then. But having money had helped. Now the nurses laughed at the offer. I said I’d rather just drink tea with honey and hope for the best.
You got mad at me because I only ever laid in beds reading books about “useless things,” the failed attempt to map the ocean. It became hard to even walk, my chest hurt so bad. I memorized names of features like prayers.
Seamount. Mid ocean ridge. Abyssal plain.
I told you bathymetry is the shape of the ocean floor. You said if I was so obsessed with the sea we should go to the beach. Isn’t that what we’d driven to the coast for?
So we walked past buildings still filled with lights in offices, past people sleeping or dead on the street. We stopped for coffee, thinking that might give me more energy. I had to take breaks to catch my breath. You looked annoyed.
At the beach there was almost no one. I shivered looking at the sun. It was a bright white circle in a sky of dark orange. The day was cold; I hadn’t brought a sweater. I sprawled out fully clothed across my towel.
I told you facts about the Atlantic–why it wasn’t as good for surfing, the animals that used to live there. I told you about the Mid-Atlantic ridge, the first ocean ridge discovered, how it showed an unpopular theory to be true. Plate tectonics, like climate collapse, a theory to turn your nose up at until proven true. It ran down the ocean floor like a pleat. I started in on rift valleys when you stopped me.
“I thought if you were here you might shut up. Maybe kiss me. We used to have so much fun.”
I felt like a little broken toy. My drawstring back now made me spew facts instead of moans of pleasure. A constant little rattle in my chest when picked up and shook. I apologized.
I said I didn’t know what had gotten into me. I said I was going for a dip to clear my head. I walked out to the shoreline with all my clothes still on. My shoes I took off.
The Mid-Atlantic ridge is the longest mountain range in the world. It oozes. It shakes. It spreads.
The water made me shiver. I walked and waded until I was deep enough to breast stroke. No slimy fingers of seaweed grabbed me, like I remembered them doing when I was a kid.
I kept swimming. I never looked back to see your face or even the shape of you. I knew my desires were impossible as always. But they were concrete.
I wanted my hands to touch what tore apart Pangea.
I wanted the lava flows to bring me warmth.
I wanted one time to be swaddled.
I wanted to be swallowed, to be welcomed.
I wanted to dive into the seam of the earth.
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Carmen E Brady writes and draws and lives in southeastern Arizona. Her writing can be found in print and online in various places, including Fine Print Press, JMWW, Vagabond City Lit, and more. You can find her on Instagram @dispassiontea.