“What’s your favorite word?” I asked Nova randomly, as we drove down the highway. Sam and Nina sat in the backseat while I sat in the front passenger and Nova drove. It was 11:16 on Wednesday night, but we had decided to take advantage of the nice sunset and cool evening wind and go for a drive.
“Intravenous.” She replied without hesitation. “Because veins are beautiful. Because veins, like tree limbs, show different paths and what extends from the root. Everybody has somewhat different vein patterns throughout their bodies, like how no fingerprint is exactly the same as another. They show identification, individuality.”
“Eh, that’s kind of a medical term though. My favorite word is phobophobia. The fear of having a phobia.” Sam said from the backseat, yawning.
“We should stop and get food. I haven’t eaten anything since like noon.” Nina chimed in as we drove past multiple fast food vendors.
“Yeah, let’s go to that diner a couple miles ahead because I want pancakes.” Nova said while turning up the music on the radio.
We sat down in a booth once getting to the nearly empty diner. Nina ordered hash browns and orange juice, Nova and I both ordered pancakes, and Sam ordered waffles. A good midnight breakfast.
Nina wore a black sweater with black, ripped jeans, Sam wore an old flannel and a beanie, I wore a faded crewneck from when I had vacationed in the Bahamas two summers ago, and Nova wore a hoodie from some concert she had gone to. Our food arrived shortly after ordering it and we all ate, slightly hungry and even more tired from school and the fact that we would have to be waking up for it again in 6 hours.
The time got away from us and we hastily left the diner when we looked at the clock hanging from the wall and saw that it was almost 1 am.
“So, tell us all again why you got that quote as a tattoo?” Sam asked Nova as she backed out of the diner’s parking lot.
She took a couple moments to get back onto the highway before she responded. “Because everything that is good also comes with bad. More specifically, everything I love ends up hurting me. For instance, love itself. Either you marry the person or your heart ends up on the floor in a million pieces. And 9 times out of 10 it’s the latter. You’re left to stitch yourself up and find all the pieces of your heart so you can be whole again. But that takes months, or years, or if the relationship was really special, you’re never whole again because that person took a part of you when they left.
“So you’ve been in love.” Nina inferred, picking the dirt from of a black-painted fingernail.
“No, I haven’t. I’ve just observed many relationships, and they all end either one way or another. Love is for dreamers, and dreamers, while idyllic, are the ones that get hurt, because they’re naïve. Realists never get their hearts broken, because they understand the simple ways in which the world works. I’m a realist.” Nova motioned with her hand while the other steered, occasionally pushing back her long, blonde hair that got in the way of seeing.
We nodded, taking in her response. Then Sam brought up something about his Physics project, and we all laughed because none of us understood physics or our teacher and we hated school and we should probably be getting home but at the same time we didn’t care enough.
I found myself trying to remember everything about that moment as it was taking place, because it was such a typical-teenager thing to do, driving around with the windows down on a school night and having no real intentions. When you look at Nova, laughing and with the headlights of cars reflected on her eyes, you can see there’s so much light in her, all these spiraling thoughts that seem to throw embers onto her skin. But I can also see that she’s lonely, that she yearns for something more but she can’t quite figure out what. I think it’s because I understand what she’s going through, because I’m in the same position. I’m lonely and I crave for something more but I don’t know what I want; I don’t even know who I am. And I wish I could tell her that I understand her jokes and her wishes and her music taste and all the things that others take for granted about her. But I can’t, because if I ever tried to tell her I know that my words would get choked up and my hands would shake and I wouldn’t be able to express my thoughts and she would just laugh it off and keep driving, singing along to Bon Iver as her hair wavered in the wind.
