Burn. Chapter 1

The pavement thudded at the bottom of her bare feet, bouncing her up like a trampoline, propelling her forward faster and faster along the hot desert highway. The wind whipped sand and strands of her long blood-red hair against her cheeks and into her eyes. She didn’t even bother to brush any of it away. She didn’t know whether it was day or night, what day it was, where she was going. The sound of sirens faded behind her, until all she could hear was her own breath and the wind. Her lungs screamed, begged her to stop, burning with the shock of the ragged, hot, dry breaths that filled them. She didn’t listen to her body, she listened to the pavement. It told her to keep running forever, forever… away, and away again. The pain of overexertion wasn’t enough anymore, the images were seeping back into her brain one by one like black and white snapshots falling out of a decaying manila folder. His shoes. The shoes she bought him for Christmas every year. She blinked moisture back into her burning dry eyes so she could see again and kept running, pushing herself faster. She couldn’t feel her feet anymore unless she stepped on something sharp, and each time she did, she relished it. The sweet, sharp pain made her catch her breath and brought her back down to earth, held her here, pulled her back into herself. And it was a good thing it did, because she felt like she might fly apart into a million pieces like a real life humpty dumpty and nobody would ever be able to put her together again. She didn’t break her stride, even though she knew she was hurt. She didn’t care. Nothing mattered. Nothing made any sense except this futile, painful, punishing journey. She pushed on and on until her legs turned into Jell-o and she stumbled, falling hard on her palms, skinning them, she looked down at the pavement and noticed her shaking knees had left small red skid marks where she landed. She tried crawling for a while but then she melted into the pavement, face down, and breathed in the dust of the road, exhausted. Digging her knees into the pavement helped, but not enough. The images started falling out of her brain again. His shoes, suspended. Six inches off the ground. Like he just jumped up to reach something off of a too-high cabinet and never landed again. The flames, the crackling. The beams breaking. The sun. The blood oozing out of her knees into the pavement, rooting her there. She was sick to her stomach, but fought the urge to vomit. She didn’t have anything in her stomach anyways. She didn’t want to feel better. She didn’t want anything except to turn back time two hours. To stop it. To stop it before it happened. To make it all go away. But she couldn’t stop it now, now nothing was ever going to be the same and the universe had shifted a few inches and everything was changed. There would never be normal day again. This was the point around which the world would now spin. Before this was the crystalline past, clear and organized. Days that made sense. Christmases. Birthdays. The time they had gone on a walk into the hills and talked about old TV commercials he remembered from the fifties. The day she graduated from high school. The day she lost her virginity in the back of her boyfriend’s car. The day they moved to this stupid po-dunk desert town in the middle of nowhere. Days that had a clear beginning and end. Days that could be defined. The future was a giant blur of red and black confusion. “This is it.” She thought. “This is pain.” She’d never really known it until now. This was the pain that she’d been running from for her whole life and now there was nothing left to do but succumb to it, feel her heart breaking and her soul ripping in two. There was nowhere to hide. It was right here, all around her, inside her, and it wasn’t going to let go of her. She felt it’s jaws tighten around her, swallowing her up as a thick, painful lump began to form in her throat. Soon hot wet tears began to roll down her face, splashing into the pavement, mixing with her sweat and saliva, both lips pressed up against the hot, black, tarry road. At first it was a silent scream, open mouthed and ugly in it’s horror. Then it picked up steam. The sobs came more easily, more uncontrollably, and soon she was screaming each breath out at the road beneath her, gagging on her own breaths. It seemed like hours passed, but it was probably only a few minutes. The crying tired her out, and she turned her cheek onto the pavement and stared out from under her shiny wet eyelashes into the heat waves that emanated from the road. She vaguely noticed the sound of a truck approaching, but didn’t move. She didn’t care. “Hit me,” she thought. “Please… just get it over with.” But a deep familiar voice inside her head taunted her. “You don’t think it’s going to be that easy do you?”

Introduction

Let me introduce myself... I go by Jamie, even though it's not my real name. It's all anyone's ever called me since I can remember, and even though it rolls off my tongue in a peculiar way, and it makes me slightly uncomfortable in it's childish lilt, it is what it is. I am a 30 year old girl? female? woman? I find it hard to describe myself in any of these terms, as I don't feel enough like a legitimate grown-up to claim the title of woman, even though I am technically a Mrs. and much to my dismay, sometimes people call me ma'am. I live in sunny Southern California, 10 miles from the house I grew up in on top of the highest hill in Laguna Beach. As the waves crashed around us and the town became famous for the lifestyles of it's wealthy inhabitants, my family lived a quiet existence in a weathered old cottage far above town. Quiet in the way that we didn't socialize much with the other people in town, loud in other ways. Loud music rolling off of my dad's record player into the dusty hills, loud fighting, loud silences. My father committed suicide in 2013, three weeks before my wedding. Much of my writing has to do with this, and processing the guilt, shame and regret that surround a suicide. If you're troubled or triggered by these kinds of topics, I suggest you stop here. I wouldn't blame you. But for those of you who are still on board, there were very interesting secrets and stories that whirled around my little house, and if you're not afraid to listen, I'm not afraid to tell them. I've often said, my father wasn't one person, he was several. Some were merciless, hardened criminals. One was a cowboy, one a fisherman. One was a builder, one was a singer of deep and beautiful songs. Some of them were rational people, and some were crazy. All of them were intense. They all looked at you with piercing dark-rimmed, seafoam-green eyes as they spoke, they told the truth as they knew it, even when that truth changed as soon as it was spoken. The face he put forth to the world was of a charismatic, well-dressed architect. He laughed loudly and drove a big fancy car. At home, he was something else. Something brighter, darker and much more intriguing than the thing he was publicly. This blog is going to be a collection of musings, memories, stories both autobiographical and fictional. Most of them are a bit of both, or a lot of one or the other. My writing reflects my love of Tarantino movies, of southern literature, and beguiling/sexy women and men. Various people I've met in real life will make appearances in one fashion or another. Not everything will have to do with a dark past, I reserve the right to write about my silly little current life as well, and sometimes it will just be complete and utter fiction, so don't take anything too seriously. Comments welcome. -J