Pardoned By the Exocutioner

There it was once again, I felt it, the blanket of heat, the subconscious wave that just began to swell above me and the surrounding area.

“Guilty by association I guess.”

That’s how I would explain when it came crashing down, taking out everyone in it’s path- women and children included.

It must be all over me, written one my face for all to see, like the fingerprints of ex-lovers that only your present lover can spot; and in this case the entire room is filled with present day love interests ready and willing to dust for prints.

Either way, I felt it scribbled clearly across my forehead, my cheeks, my lips – and just my luck, no mirror.

I tried to use her poker-faced eyes she was born blessed with to see my reflection, but it was like trying to see your reflection in the back of an old, stained restaurant spoon, where everything’s been caked on in secrets and where everything’s backwards and upside down The kind of spoon so tarnished you can never really tell who used it before you.

I struggled to grasp how she continuously read the fucked up ideas in my head and how she seemed to always keep time with the off time beats in my chest. Together, the ideas and the beats worked as one to speak in a language she had never heard before yet she could understand it, read it, write it, and even worse, predict it. They were finally on the same page, the ideas up top and beats mid way, and they were speaking loud and clear.

“Did you say something?”

She spoke with a level of assertion that could easily either a.) scare a man or b.) turn a man on.

Commence silent freak out.

“Nah,” I stood my ground. I didn’t lie either. I didn’t say anything, at least my mouth didn’t.

“I could’ve sworn I heard your insides screaming. Like they were begging me to keep you around,” spoken with the same tone she gave before.

She listened closer. She listened harder, but with ease. Each heartbeat inside of me struggled to tell her what it meant by every pound.

The sounds always came out muffled due to the build up of blood that seemed to congregate day in and day out in my chest but for some reason always seemed to forget about the appointment it had with my brain.
“There it is again! I heard it!” She continued without hesitation, “But it’s in a misplaced romance language I thought we lost long ago. I guess it’s just the parlance that has kept us bound all along. Don’t you agree?”

I couldn’t say it out loud, but in my skull, where it's safe, I was yelling at the top of my lungs. “Yes! Exactly! Run with that idea, because my legs have given out long ago and I’m begging you to carry us! If you let me use your legs, I’ll let you use my eyes.”

It was her sole flaw, the only wrinkle in her blueprints- she had a terrible time using her eyes to see what was directly in front of her, although, she did use them for everything else.

I continued on in my head. It’s more than likely that too much time has passed since she asked me if I agreed with her, and it’s more than likely that enough time has went by to lose her attention completely. This time was different though. I was taken back by it, but I knew I could take my time. So, again, I went on with the run on sentence in my brain that refuses any type of punctuation mark to be attached to it.

It was better that way due to the fact that my ADD keeps me from finishing any thought anyway. That’s what she was always around for. She finished my thoughts, she added the period to my statements, the exclamation point to excitement, and she was the reason so many question marks were gathering violently in an unruly crowd in my cranial space.

At that moment I began to believe to a pseudo type ESP. Telepathy between two people and only two people. I pictured my brain waves traveling through the air and wished that they would sneak their way directly into her thoughts. I could see them come out but as words, complete sentences shockingly enough. I watched them while they held their breath and as they traveled amidst the tension soaked air to their main destination. They knew if they could only make it a few more feet they would end up where all my words wanted their final resting place to be, calmly nestled inside her brain where she will analyze and store them and place them in memory banks that are alphabetically ordered. Mine would all go under the letter “C” of course but not because of my name but because that is where they belonged, directly next to her thoughts.

All at once my words lined up and sub-consciously displayed to her what my insides had been discussing all along.

“It’s in a code! Dissect them because no one else can. No one else was ever willing to take the time to recognize the beauty in the mess we’ve made. While we stand on lies in the form of ice, with heat at our feet from the sun in the sky, we wait for our certain demise. And personally, I never thought we would survive long enough to see the melt.”

But like clockwork, somehow, with brash intentions and a sense of cavalier bravado she was about to conquer the road less taken and she was going surprise the world for one last time.

She spoke calmly because she knew I needed it and she called me by my birth name because she never did and knew how bad I wanted it.

“Relax your bones, Chris. Take a second to catch your breath, let me explain. You look like an inmate next in line for execution, but what I don’t understand, and what I’ll never get, is how you consistently and peacefully prepare yourself for another death by my hand. I should be the one strapped to a chair with electricity running through my veins. I should be headfirst in a guillotine with your hand tugging the rope.”

Commence silent freak out.

“Boy, I can feel you thinking and I can hear your chest. I can see your words as they try their best. And even though your lips are differing I’ll just let those words fall to the ground. For once I’ll listen to your heart this time I can hear it loud. Please forgive my mistakes and look passed my ways. For once we’ll listen to your heart, this last time we’re never coming down.”