Dark Matter

Crouch, Blake

maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.


Whole Foods smells like the hippie I dated before Daniela—a tincture of fresh produce, ground coffee, and essential oils.


There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I love my life, but I haven’t felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.


“When I left the bar, my mind was elsewhere. I wasn’t thinking. I stepped out into traffic and this cab nearly splattered me all over the pavement. Scared the hell out of me. I don’t know how to explain it, but ever since that moment—in the grocery store, walking home, standing here in our kitchen—I have felt so alive. Like I see my life with force and clarity for once. All the things I have to be grateful for. You. Charlie.” She feels her anger toward him beginning to melt. He says, “It’s like we get so set in our ways, so entrenched in those grooves, we stop seeing our loved ones for who they are. But tonight, right now, I see you again, like the first time we met, when the sound of your voice and your smell was this new country.


Trawled?


trolled


The overarching question that plagues me in this moment: What has happened to me? There’s no way to answer that. Not yet. I have vague suspicions of course, but suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn’t lead to truth.


My Daniela carries a weight and a distance in her eyes that scare me sometimes. This Daniela is an inch off the ground.


“So how serious is it?” I ask. “We’ve been out a few times. Nobody’s leaving their toothbrushes at anyone’s house yet.” “Well, I think he’d like to. He seems pretty smitten.” Daniela smirks. “How could he not be? I’m amazing.”


Chicago-style hot dogs,


“It actually makes a lot of sense.” “You think?” “He wasn’t a monster. If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That’s how decent people justify bad behavior.


My understanding of identity has been shattered—I am one facet of an infinitely faceted being called Jason Dessen who has made every possible choice and lived every life imaginable.