Wild And Crazy

You like her, you like her because she’s wild and crazy. She’s a hurricane and you’re a light drizzle in the wind. You like it when she runs her fingers through her messed-up hair, and screams into the evening. And you like listening to her hum along to the mixtape you brought along, and right now she’s humming to 015B and Primary, and leaning back into her seat, the adrenaline leaving her dry and weak.

But she’s smiling, and so are you.

You like it when she laughs and laughs when nothing’s funny, and you laugh along with her.

You like it when you pull over at the gas station, and she disappears into the convenience store and appears again with a paper bag full of unpaid items. You don’t ask where she gets the stuff from, but you smile softly at her proud face, and at her urging you to hurry fill the gas, because she doesn’t want trouble.

You like it when she leans against your car and draws stars and hearts on the dried dust particles, you imagine her writing your name and hers, but you roll down the windows and she frowns at you, and moves to the other windows.

She is captivating, contagious, an illness you don’t ever want to be cured of.

“Tiffany keeps on yelling at me. She’s calling us both dumb idiots to drive up to Diamond Bar.”

“Well, domestic flights were all fully booked.”

“Hey,” she calls you and you look at her running her finger along the window, creating a smear of pale white.

“Yeah?”

“Are we lost?”

“Not all who wander are lost.”

“Cut the crap, Tae. We’re lost, aren’t we?”

“No, not really.”

“Hmm. Diamond Bar was the last exit out. The one you drove past,” she says flatly and you don’t say anything.

She takes that as an answer and begins to laugh.

“So we are lost.”

“Shh. Listen to the song. This is my favourite part,” you say, though you’d love to hear her laughter go on and on forever.

Yes, it’s your favourite part. Her laughter is your favourite part.

The dry, Californian air is spicy and tangy, and you smell the occasional cigarette and fume come your way and sting your eyes. You won’t admit it, but you love taking car rides with her, and you love it when the car breaks down or runs out of gas, and you’re miles away from any town, miles away from anywhere. You love watching her try to hitch a ride from over-timing delivery trucks, and the shape of her pale legs in the moonlight.

She’ll yell at you for not doing anything after giving up on fixing the car, and you’ll yell back your usual response, ‘It’s too late. Let’s wait till light out.’

And then you watch her while you lie back in the front seat, smile when she looks at you and throw rocks at you.

Later at night, when she’s given up too, she’ll crawl into your car and lightly touch the bruises on your arms from the rocks she threw. You like her at night, more so than you like her in daylight, because she’s most sober at night, chilled by the night air.

She likes to hug her knees and watch the moon, and when there’s no moon, she likes to tell you what colours the clouds are at night and what’s the constellation for that night.

You like listening to her, and you sometimes wish morning never comes, and the both of you will never reach Diamond Bar. You can just wander, spend nights at motels if you’re lucky enough to find a town, spend mornings driving to nowhere, wild and crazy, young and free.

You have prepared a thermos of hot coffee for this, and you pour out the coffee into plastic cups and give her one. She sips her coffee and sighs happily.

“Tae,” she says and you hum in reply, “the sky is dark today, almost black, and it’s a new moon.”

You smile but you don’t say anything, believing words to be the start of misunderstandings. You can’t say how pretty she looks, can’t grab her hand, because you’re thinking of Tiffany waiting for her at Diamond Bar.

And you can only give her smiles and laugh with her, but your tears and her tears aren’t the same.

You want to tell her that she’s so full of the world, so full of moonlight and hot coffee, tell her how she has the world in her pocket, tell her how she is loved by so many people.

But you pour yourself another cup of coffee and you sit back to enjoy the desert plains.

You pass her a blanket you have in the backseat, and she says nothing as you drape it over the both of you.

She’s rarely quiet, and in her silences, you like to turn the radio on and listen to the classical songs they play at night. You can’t say anything she wants to hear, so you keep quiet too and listen. With crickets and the sounds of the passing vehicles, you believe this is perfect.

“I’m going to sleep,” she tells you and crumples her plastic cup, tossing it into a bush.

She pats the blanket over your arm and you sit there still, drinking the night alone.

Tomorrow, you will have to take her to Diamond Bar. And then she won’t be having car rides with you. But she looks so happy with you that you almost believed she couldn’t be any happier.

You sit with your back against the car, and you try to understand how this universe works, why there always have to be someone left behind.

She doesn’t recall falling asleep, but she recalls the question she dared herself to ask, and the one she still doesn’t have an answer for.

Can’t we all be happy?

~+~

When you open your eyes, she’s still asleep, curled up in the backseat, hugging your backpack.

You tell yourself that she misses Tiffany, and you try your hardest to fix the car, and try to get help from the passing drivers. Finally, as she sleeps, you gun the engine and you drive to Diamond Bar, listening to your mind say, ‘Turn back.’

You arrive in a few hours, when she’s just awoken from sleep and is slow and uncoordinated and is greeted into Tiffany’s arms.

“Jessi!” Tiffany takes her in her arms and you smile and lean against your car.

Tiffany finally hugs you too, and thanks you for taking Jessica to her safely. You nod to tell her that you get it. They invite you to dinner at their new place at Diamond Bar, but you say that you have to leave.

“See you guys back in Seoul,” you tell them and you wave goodbye, don’t think of the things they’ll say to each other that you can’t, don’t think of the things they’ll do to each other that you can’t.

During your drive back, you sip your energy drink, smack your lips at its sweet taste. You think of how the world is able to contain Jessica, how the world is able to hold and embrace her large ideas that are so bright and shiny, with stardust and neon lights.

You like to think of her legs in the moonlight and the memories you take back with you when driving with her. And maybe you’ll take her to Las Vegas, and you’ll show her all the kinds of things she’s born to do.

You like to think of her as a wild and crazy thing, and she does all kinds of wild and crazy things to you.

And you like her for it.

—ジュリエット