Kamikaze Heart

by Craze, Chelle C.

  “I’m sure. I’m moving,” I interrupted her with the truth, hoping she didn’t think I was too much of an asshole, knowing that was exactly what I was. Strong people did not run from their problems; they faced them. At least that was the popular opinion among society, but sometimes, it was equally important to know when to quit. This was the point I admitted defeat. Over the years, I had become an expert at recognizing the end. I had to. It was better to let acceptance in, letting life result how it may. Not swim in a constant state of denial, never knowing when you would sink to the bottom. I’d been there before, and it almost took everything I had within me to reach the surface.

  “Okay,” she breathed out heavily, clearly upset with my news.

  “Thank you for understanding,” I choked out, ending the call and thinking of the details that would determine what part of Louisiana I moved to.

  After filling Alf’s food bowl, I showered and worked out all the details in my head. I put pink Post-it notes on anything large I wanted and took pictures of them for proof, sending them via text to Roland.

  Me: These are the things I’ll have moved to where I am going. The house is yours. I don’t want it. Hope your dick falls off.

  Roland: You’re moving?

  My thumbs ticked out a long message, asking him what he expected me to do, and then erased it. It wouldn’t do me any good to send the text. It would only cause him to respond, and at this point the least amount of contact from him was best.

  Pulling off one last pink piece of paper, I wrote “Fuck you” on it and carefully placed it onto my cat, Alf’s chest, snapping a picture before he could shake it loose. I was being petty, but at least I wasn’t unleashing all of my rage on him. I was afraid if I did, I would never get myself back. I wanted to be strong, but Roland surrounded me. The house still lingered with the smell of his aftershave. There were memories of us in every inch of this house.

  Roland: Really? Trin, don’t you think you are overreacting just a little?

  Me: Just be thankful I am leaving you the house and not torching it instead.

  Roland: Seriously? You wouldn’t do that.

  Me: Try me…

  I laughed as three dots appeared on the screen and faded several times. He was no doubt trying to think of a good reply, but I didn’t want it. I no longer wanted anything from him, other than the peace of being left alone, which he’d mostly respected. He’d only texted when I messaged him first. He was never the one to initiate the conversation. That fact alone shocked me. Roland had always been the persistent one out of the two of us, so the fact he was stepping back showed one of two things. Either he was truly sorry for what I’d witnessed or he simply didn’t care. I didn’t want to know which of the two was the truth. It would not change my mind.

  Eventually, I set my phone down, and Alf ran through the gap in my legs as soon as he freed himself of my note, eyeing me with judgment.

  “I know, buddy. I’m sorry, but I swear it’s the only time I’ll force you to do my dirty work. Promise.” I giggled. A small weight lifted from my body when the screen blackened, and I scooped Alf into my arms. His head moved backward, and his ears flattened against his head in protest. Clearly, he would not be forgiving me easily, and honestly, I wouldn’t have either if I were him.

  “Fine. I will try not to stick things to you anymore.” A small laugh piped through my frown, and I set him in front of his food bowl. That would brighten his day, and hopefully he would soon forgive me. He picked up one of the small brown Xs with his mouth and then glanced at me, snapping the morsel between his sharp teeth.

  I spent the better part of the morning trying to pinpoint where exactly I would move us. Throwing my hands in the air, I gave up. At this point, letting fate decide our new home seemed to make as much sense as the past twenty-four hours had. I decided to leave it up to chance, searching the internet for towns in the area, and turned my head as I thumb-scrolled through the results. My only hope was whichever place won this insane plan was one of the most boring places on Earth. Slowing down to a crawl was exactly what I needed.

  “Blackwell.” I nodded. The name was boring enough. At least I could pronounce it with ease, and it wasn’t a name with five syllables. I think if it had been more complex, the idea of leaving my fate up to chance would have ended.

  “What do you think about Blackwell, Alf?” I yelled through the house, and of course, he didn’t reply. He was a cat. The thing that set him apart from most felines I had met was he usually meowed when I talked to him, but he couldn’t be judged for his silence in this matter. He was probably questioning my sanity. I was. But, my mind was made up on this subject. We were leaving.

  After a brief time searching, I found an apartment for rent in the area—a two bedroom with a view—and contacted the landlord immediately. Picking up and moving on a whim wasn’t the sanest decision I had made, but I needed to feel safe. This home had been that for me, but the more time I spent here, the closer I grew to losing it.

  The sensation pounding within me was like jumping into the deepest of waters and forgetting you didn’t have gills. You were able to wade water, but after a while, if you didn’t reach the shore, you were bound to tire and drown. That was what it felt like to be here. I was sinking, just treading water where my feet could not touch.

  “Great. Thank you, Eli.” I took down the information he gave and saved his number in the contacts of my phone. He assured me the details could be worked out upon my arrival, and his Southern drawl made my insides still. Hearing him tell it, the place of chance was inviting. Perhaps it was his whole Southern hospitality. Maybe it was the fact I was one step closer to leaving. It was what I was good at.

  4

  Trinity

  All my bags were packed and stuffed into the back hatch of my car. Alf was in his carrier asleep, and I was on my third cup of coffee. I had only stopped once, long enough to refill on gas and let Alf come out and complain. He hated car rides, always had.

  According to the GPS on my phone, I was twenty minutes away from the apartment where Eli was meeting me. The thought that I was about to be murdered crossed my mind, but I squared my shoulders, gripped the steering wheel, and pushed forward. Giving up was not in my blood, but somehow running away was a close second. Maybe it was how I was. Who knew? I didn’t care. I didn’t want to tuck my tail and head back now. I had already put sixteen hours of distance between Roland and me, and it didn’t feel like enough. But it had to be. I refused to change my mind. Going back was not a possibility for me now.

  Needing to clear my head and the downward spiral my brain was falling into, I turned up the volume of my radio to full blast. I didn’t know the song, so I made up the words as it progressed.

  “Turn left,” the GPS instructed, and I eyed it cautiously because the road wasn’t paved. It was dirt and gravel. An unbeaten path that held my future, whatever it may be.

  “If I end up in BFE, you’re the first thing I’m replacing after I find a job.” I sneered, flipping my signal light on, and when the road was clear turning onto the dirt road.

  As I glanced into the rearview mirror, panic set into my bones and blood. Maybe this was not what I should be doing. The scariest part of all of this was letting go of my entire life, but that wasn’t exactly what I was doing. Was it? I was not one to leave things up to chance, and I definitely didn’t want to lose control of events, but there wasn’t a different solution in sight. Slowly, I breathed outward and a trail of dust rose in the car’s path. Like me, everything was still up in the air, thrown into oblivion, and out of my control. But it was a peaceful chaos. When things were unknown, most people feared it. I had faced the most unrelenting heartache in my life before Roland, so anything this new life could offer me would be a blessing.

  Until now, I had been strong, other than a few tears here and there. I refused to weep over Roland, because although he may have broken a portion of my heart, he never had the power to crush it. It did not belong to him. That was Armon, my son’s
right. Every day I needed him to remember who I was, but each time my eyes opened, I was faced with the brutal reality that he was gone.

  I sniffled, the truth of what I was doing sank into my flesh, and I slammed my foot onto the brake. Alf meowed in protest when his carrier slung forward, and I apologized mom-arming his cage with force to keep him from clattering into the floorboard. I just needed a minute for myself. One fragment of time away from anyone, where I was alone to mourn my son and the person I used to be. A mother.

  “What the hell am I doing, Alf?” I asked, and his eyes burned me with his hate.

  “I know I’m crazy, right?” I fumed, angry with myself for traipsing on Armon’s memory. Somewhere along the road I had mixed my pain of losing Roland with those of Armon. It was something I should have never done.

  He didn’t bother to look up, but curled into a ball of fur.

  “Good answer,” I babbled to myself, mostly due to my back and forth emotions. I questioned every ounce of my rationality, but I would be lying if I said this was the first time. I had been teetering the line of sanity and loss for five years, and I never knew which quarter I’d land on when I awoke each day.

  The car rolled to a stop and I let my body flex in a much-needed stretch. Killing the engine, I climbed out of the car. My body ached from all the built-up tension, and being stuffed into a car for so long added to the stiffness. The first note of “ABC” by The Jackson 5 blared outward from the speakers. Since no one was around, I saw an opportunity to work the stress out of my body. It was a coping mechanism I had learned from the few appointments I’d actually spent with a psychiatrist for PTSD. It was suggested after I’d lost Armon to seek counseling. Living in the present and not the past was what I was supposed to be doing. I just couldn’t get on the same page as the rest of the world; I didn’t want to move on. I wanted to honor my son’s memories. I didn’t want to tell a stranger about him and was afraid if I let go of even the tiniest piece of him, I would forget him.

  When I met Roland, I never spoke of Armon. Fuck. He didn’t even know I had a son. I should have told him, but every day he fell a little more for the woman I used to be. It was clear in the way his eyes watched my every move with admiration. It wasn’t who I was, though. At first, I pretended to be who he thought I was, even though it felt like I was only flesh and bones. I went along with the motions, and after a while, it was who I was on the outside. At that time, I just needed to figure out how to live. It wasn’t possible to think of everything that had been torn apart. If I had, I would not be alive. It was something I was certain of.

  “Did I miss the party invitation?” A tall man laughed, standing up from the chair on the porch I did not see until now, and approached me. He probably wasn’t what most would consider up there in height, but I only stood at five-foot-three. So, everyone was tall to me. His hair was on the brink of what one would consider messy, but the way his wild strands of chestnut fell into a pile on his head looked almost intentional.

  I froze in place, and my heart screamed with panic. It held such force it was painful. I didn’t want him to see me. The real me. The side I didn’t let anyone see. Even though it was only a glimpse into the vulnerability I kept hidden from the world, it was still too much. It showed weakness, and I was so stupid to not notice him. I should have seen him. It was too late to take any of it back, and I wished I could. The way his posture plummeted from that of a straightened arrow to a sympathetic slump as soon as his eyes connected with mine and the pace of his feet slowed to a dreadful walk confirmed the reason I kept this part of me from every person I encountered. He felt sorry for me. It wasn’t his fault by any means. This was most people’s reaction when I let myself slip into the past. Regardless of his conviction, it didn’t stop my teeth from grinding together with animosity. He didn’t know he was an intruder in my life, and I reminded myself of that, rolling my shoulders in an attempt to reduce the stress building within my muscles.

  I batted the tears off my cheeks and stopped dancing. This wasn’t for someone else to see. It belonged to Armon and me. It was what we did when the weight of the world seemed to be a little too much to bear. I was a single mom with limited income, so we both were all too familiar with disappointment. With Armon, it was easier to accept the bad with the good because his smile beckoned light into the darkest parts of my life. The havoc of the world surrounding us held no measurable weight on a scale when he was alive, simply because he was my safe haven. With the tiniest display of love, a hug for example, he stopped the trepidation clenching the air from my lungs and it was lifted. It was that simple. He was more than my son; he was the air I breathed. Without him, the oxygen passing through my body burned with each breath I took.

  “You weren’t invited.” I sneered, hating the intrusion that increased with each hesitant step he took toward me.

  “You weren’t either,” he answered my fury with just as much power, his eyes shifting from sorrow to a challenge, daring me to argue the fact.

  “I was.”

  “Is. That. Right?” he enunciated each word in a thick Southern drawl and stopped a foot away from me, holding the strength to bury me alive. My heart erratically welcomed the small distance between us and greedily begged for him to close it as it fluttered unevenly within my chest. In a different world, maybe I would have given in to my heart’s wishes by grabbing him as I impulsively kissed him in the way his dark irises and playful smirk dared me to do. Yet, in this life, I was too far gone to ever be the person who lived in a moment. I lived in moments, not just one. Some people were capable of embracing the singular parts of life, but for me, it wasn’t that simple. There were too many important seconds that I’d lived to just carelessly toss them by the wayside, as if they didn’t matter. They mattered so much that I didn’t know how to carry on without them. My past held such significance that it made me who I am, and it was impossible to give one more substance than the next.

  “Mm-hmm. Eli asked me here,” I pointed out the only fact I could stand on and straightened my posture, trying to appear more confident than I was. It was difficult to perfect the art of life dancing when your body stood in an arabesque stance and most of your weight was dependent on the support of one straightened leg. The foot that held my unsteady balance slipped farther into yesterday with each new day as it shook with fear and inch-by-inch bent a little more out of the correct position.

  “Elijah ‘Eli’ Boudreau.” He cleared his throat and stifled his laugh behind his hand before extending it to me. “You must be Trinity.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes as it had when he was laughing. It was a smile for business, not one inspired by happiness. He took my hand in his and rubbed small circles into my palm, his chest rising and falling in a jagged pattern much like my own. He was one of those people. Maybe this was a moment for him, and honestly, I couldn’t deny if I had been anyone else, it wouldn’t have been for me, too. It was the embarrassing scene that an author loved to indulge their main characters in, right before they randomly fell into bed with one another. Yet, the ruthless truth of reality lay outside the black words typed onto a white page. At times, people were more complex and simply couldn’t fall into an insta-love type scenario so many loved to read about. Sometimes, they were too broken to ever fit into the category of love at all, so they never made it into publication. People were real, and on occasion, the emotions coursing within them were so raw they would never be something an author wrote about, because no one wanted to read about the fallen. They wanted a story about the actual events that caused them to fall. The problem between Eli and me was, I’d lost my balance long before this instance, and even though Eli stood on the brink of tipping over, I had plunged to my reckoning long before his eyes crashed into mine. My story had been written onto sheets of paper years before I met him, and now, the novel of my life was slammed shut. There would never be a continuation to it. I wasn’t a work in progress; I was a finale.

  I was sinking farther into myself, and I‘d checked out on hi
m and the semi-conversation we were having, leaving my body to seek its own mission. My eyes roamed his body, and it was only then I noticed he wasn’t wearing an undershirt, as the unbuttoned flannel blew in the breeze around his toned body. I’d been too distracted with thoughts to fully assess the situation unfolding before me. It took a couple of seconds for my attention to travel back onto his face, and my stomach swirled with embarrassment as he smiled. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t an intentional thought. Even if his body didn’t have so many ripples, my eyes wanted to spend hours, days following the intricate lines of ink on his body. I’d always been too much of a chicken to get a tattoo of my own, but I loved the way ink scarred into skin more than I should have. It was a hidden weakness of mine.

  A light chuckle crept out of his knowing smirk. He was probably used to other women undressing him with their eyes, but in my defense, he was only partly clothed. I couldn’t be held completely accountable for my body’s reaction to his. This was partially his fault, too. Who met a prospective tenant without being fully dressed?

  “Where is your shirt?” I abruptly blurted out, my eyes squinting with suspicion. Perhaps my earlier assumption was right. He was here to lure me to my death. Maybe he would use his charming smile and Greek godlike body to distract me as he slowly stole my life. This all was insane. Nothing about this was normal to think about, but even if I didn’t want my thoughts to race, I couldn’t stop them. I was trying, but every time I risked a glance into his mesmerizing brown eyes, I slid the tiniest bit farther from rationality. I never claimed to have a strong grasp on reality, but being around this man had made it worsen.

  “It’s right here.” He pulled at the red and black checkered shirt and shook his head. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is the South, and it’s hot as balls, lady.” I was always cold, so no, I didn’t notice right away. The warm air whisking around us was something I welcomed at first, but the longer we stood, the hotter my skin got. If I were still in West Virginia, I would have on several layers just to be somewhat comfortable. Now, I wanted nothing more than a tank top and a pair of cut-off shorts, but that wasn’t a luxury available to me.