Page 6 of Born to Run Back
Chapter Four
Half-Remembered Nights
Wendy
The headlights shone across the guardrail as I rounded the familiar curve, my pulse already quickening with that Pavlovian anticipation.
Eight weeks now. Eight weeks of this ritual, this sacred choreography of need and stones and the growing, gnawing certainty that I was either losing my mind completely or participating in the most important conversation of my life.
But something was different tonight.
The asphalt where I usually parked still glistened with recent tire tracks, the wet shine that spoke of departure rather than arrival.
Someone had been here. Recently. Very recently.
My hands trembled as I cut the engine, the silence rushing in like water into a sinking boat.
The memorial looked different in the glow of my headlights—larger, more elaborate.
The familiar stones were there, including the dark one with the quartz veins that had appeared one night and instantly become my favorite, the one I’d named “Starlight” in the private language of my deteriorating mind.
But tonight, the entire arrangement had been rebuilt. Restructured. As if he’d knelt here for an hour, maybe more, carefully placing each stone with the devotion of a monk building a monastery.
I sat frozen in place, staring at the evidence of his presence. The tracks were still damp enough to reflect my headlights, which meant… minutes. I’d missed him by mere minutes.
Minutes.
The word ricocheted through my skull like a fucking bullet.
Minutes meant I could have seen him. Minutes meant if I’d left my apartment at 2:10 instead of 2:20, if I hadn’t stopped to change my shirt twice, if I hadn’t stood in my hallway for six full minutes working up the courage to grab the painted rock from my kitchen counter—
Climbing down on shaky, unsteady legs, I walked to the cairn and knelt beside it, my fingers hovering over the restructured arrangement.
Some of them were still warm. Not from the sun—it was December, nearly three in the morning—but from human hands.
His hands. His big, warm, calloused, beautiful hands.
The ache in my chest was a physical thing, sharp enough to make me gasp. To be this close, to have missed each other by such a narrow margin, felt like cosmic cruelty.
Three minutes. Maybe five. If I’d driven faster, if I’d taken the freeway instead of the stupid surface streets, if I hadn’t sat in my car in my building's parking lot crying over the memory of his hands in my hair until I was almost too exhausted to even start the engine…
My thoughts spiraled, a familiar descent into the arithmetic of obsession.
I’d been calculating our near-misses for weeks now, mapping out the almosts and the what-ifs that had become more real to me than my actual life.
The spreadsheet hidden on my laptop had columns for arrival times, departure times, weather conditions, the exact configuration of stones and flowers.
Evidence of a mind that had crossed some invisible line between madness and grief and kept walking.
I could almost see him in my peripheral vision, a shadow disappearing around the bend, spearmint gum and spicy aftershave fading into the frigid desert air. The hallucination was so vivid I turned my head, my pulse hammering with the desperate hope that maybe, this time, just maybe—
But there was only darkness. Only the sting of wind rushing across the canyon and the terrible weight of being alone again.
I pressed my palm to the asphalt where his tires had been, as if I could absorb some trace of him, some proof that this wasn’t all the elaborate self-delusions of a woman who’d lost herself one cold rainy night in this exact ravine before me.
The pavement was still warm against my skin; real, undeniable evidence that somewhere in this sprawling valley of strip malls and suburbs, he was driving home, probably thinking about the woman who would find his offering sometime soon.
If only he’d known. If only I’d known.
We both might’ve stayed that night.
But I was the woman whose name he still didn’t know. The woman who was too pathetic to leave so much as a fucking note.
The woman who had become a coward.
Theo
Friday, 2:57 a.m., same week
The album had been playing on repeat for the last hour of my drive, Springsteen’s voice filling the hollow spaces in my car like smoke, like prayer, like the ghost of every dream I’d abandoned along the way.
Born to Run —Christ, when had that become the soundtrack to my slow-motion breakdown into madness?
The opening piano chords of the title track hammered through the pounding speakers, and I found myself pressing harder on the accelerator, chasing something, or someone, I couldn’t quite reach through empty canyon roads.
Bruce sang about breaking a trap, of running…
The irony wasn’t entirely lost on me. A thirty-four-year-old high school teacher, driving alone at nearly three in the morning, convinced he was running toward something instead of away from everything.
But the music fit, somehow. The desperation in Bruce’s voice matched the desperate rhythm of my thundering pulse, the way my hands gripped the steering wheel like it was the only thing keeping me tethered to reality.
Maybe it was.
When I rounded the curve toward mile marker eighteen, for the first time since the night of the accident, everything changed .
Taillights. Red and glowing, disappearing around the bend ahead like a vision in the night, like an answer to every prayer I’d been afraid to give voice to. My heart stopped, then started up again, rattling against my ribs with such violence I thought I might actually pass out.
It was her. It had to be her.
The saxophone exploded from the speakers, wild and urgent and untamed, as my foot slammed down on the accelerator.
The canyon walls blurred past as I took the curves faster than safe, faster than sane, chasing those disappearing lights like a man possessed.
The music throbbed in my ears, matching the frantic rhythm of my pulse, and I wanted it to hurt.
Wanted the sound to shred through me until there was nothing left but this dangerous, hopeless, beautiful agony of… almost.
But the road stretched ahead of me, and suddenly I could make out an ancient station wagon, wood paneling gleaming in the moonlight.
It wasn’t her.
I allowed the taillights to become swallowed by distance and darkness.
Doubling back, I pulled over where our memorial waited, my hands shaking as I cut the engine. In the sudden, drowning silence, Springsteen’s voice felt like an accusation, like the echo of every chance I’d missed, every moment I’d arrived too late.
Broken. That’s what I fucking was. Broken in ways I couldn’t even define anymore, chasing ghosts through canyon roads at three in the morning, building shrines to a woman whose name I might never know.
The stones on my passenger seat had never looked so heavy.