Dirt

Manipulative Bitch

    It was the most unrealistic dream I could have imagined though it made perfect sense to me why I had dreamt it. I was an older woman with dry hair pulled into an unkempt bun and horrendously beige coloured clothing the likes you would find at a charity shop.
    I sat on the decaying porch of Trevor’s trailer, now more rusted and rotted than ever next to an even older man, with terrible bags under his eyes and little to no hair left on his head. Of course the man was Trevor himself, still wearing the same old dirty t-shirts and now hunched over in a cheap yellow lawn chair with a beer in hand.
    It was a sight to see, I being an onlooker in my dream, as you often oddly tend to be when dreaming about yourself. Old me was clutching a book in her hands, some used copy of that Dickens’ novel where we are left guessing if young Copperfield might indeed turn out to be the hero of his own life or not. Dreams are so distastefully symbolic.
    Trevor continued to sip at his beer and I continued to read and we did not say a word to each other, the way people who have known one another for far too long and no longer feel the need to fill every moment with mindless chatter do. I rather enjoyed watching the two of us like this, old and silent and somehow managing to coexist.
    I wondered if my future self had ever went home and finished her degree. Did she come back after some time or simply stay and abandon everything, all for one night of love with a man she did not know? As I watched her I felt both warmed and sick to my stomach, knowing my future was soon approaching and that I would have to choose a path to take.
    The prospect of never returning home was absolutely ridiculous, yet I still found myself trying to resist it. It was when I realized I was dreaming that I awoke the next morning, and for a moment believing myself to have still been old me from my dream. It was Trevor’s face that brought me back into reality, still in it’s state of middle-aged, haggard perfection.
    He slept with his hands clenching at me as if I might be abducted by aliens at any point in the night. I lightly pressed my lips to his forehead and caressed his arm until his body was no longer in a state of stress and his hands were able to relax. I slid away from him, gently and with great care not to wake him; he looked incredibly peaceful, breathing deeply and not emitting loud snores for the first time.
    I wanted to go clean myself properly, this time not languidly scrubbing at myself while over dosing on drugs, and I wanted to put on a proper outfit, something other than the dingy shirt and sweat pants I had been sporting. I slipped out of Trevor’s bed; the creaking mattress causing me to wince as I did so. Trevor rolled onto his back, still deep in sleep, mumbling incoherently.
    Before making my way back to our makeshift shower I found myself observing Trevor’s home in great detail. I touched unidentified crumbs on grimy countertops that stuck to the tips of my fingers, I picked up shards of glass from broken bottles and collected them in my hands, I admired the crack patterns in the water stained ceiling that looked to me like complex fractals.
    The trailer was like an interactive work of art, painstakingly put together through years of neglect and torment. As I reached for the doorknob I was startled by the voice that had arisen behind me, it drove splinters into my spine, “What in the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I had been so immersed in the world of the artistic showcase that I mustn’t of heard him getting up, either that or he had made an explicit effort to creep up on me in silence.
    The tone of his voice instilled guilt in me even though I hadn’t done anything wrong; simply entertaining the thought that I had done something that Trevor found upsetting made me feel as though I were a terrible person.
    Before I had the time to turn to face him or utter a word from my lips he was shouting and I did not dare speak until he was finished, “I should have known, how could I have been so fucking stupid? I knew you would go crawling back to those little cunts you call your friends, and now, on top of that, not even fucking tell me? To think I thought you were anything more than some dumb slut trying to get some free drinks out of me, hell, you’re worse than that because you had to come back here and fuck with my life like the manipulative bitch that you are.”
    As he spoke he paced back and forth, not looking me in the eye or anywhere near me for that matter. His words did not bother me, a simple misunderstanding I supposed, it was the anger that had me taken aback. I knew more than well that he was capable of it, but I had yet to experience it so directly.
    “If you think you can fuck with me like that then you’ve got something else coming sweetheart. Nobody, nobody, fucks with me. How did I not see this shit coming? How could I believe that for once in my pathetic fucking life that anyone would give two shits about me without asking anything in return? I’m such a fucking stupid sack of shit prick, fuck!” At this he kicked at the couch that was already well past it’s prime the little stuffing it had flew out of it as he swore profusely.
    A twang of sympathy fled my mind momentarily; despite the verbal abuse I couldn’t manage to muster an ounce of sadness or anger, all I could feel was hollowness and pity for the most miserable man on earth.
    I acted upon impulse without considering the possible danger in what I did, the likely danger. The premise of being murdered in cold blood by Trevor did not bother me in the slightest, I had nothing worth going home to anyways. What I did, I did out of the raw purity of my idiot heart, I grabbed his arm and pulled him to face me with all of my strength. At the moment nothing mattered more to me than fixing whatever part of Trevor I had accidentally smashed.
    I could see it in his eyes, the fumes of absolute anger from the fire within. How I managed to speak up at that moment I will never know, and I did it without fear, “Trevor,” I kept my voice calm and void of emotion, “Listen to me. I wasn’t leaving. I was going to shower. I wouldn’t lie to you.” All was silent except for his deep breathing echoed by the trembling of his chest.
    He yanked his arm away from me with a growl, turning away once again and bringing his hands to his forehead in frustration and continuing to pace back and forth. I stood there with my wrist slightly twisted from trying to hold on to Trevor as he pulled away and watched him act out his idiosyncrasies, observing his every movement.
    “Will you stop fucking staring at me?” He demanded, voice slightly broken, “Just let me… Let me fucking think, okay?” He kept his hands over his eyes as though placing himself in somewhere very far away from me. I did as he told me to and retreated to the bedroom, taking a seat on the blood stained mattress and keeping still, not wanting to give up my façade of bravery.
    I could hear grumbled swearing from the other side of the trailer, various sounds of things shattering and being broken and of course Trevor’s heavy breaths, and then finally silence. I couldn’t help but feel slightly worried; not quite trusting that his rage had subsided, I decided to give him another minute to recuperate.
    It was at that moment that I heard them, the shattered sobs, starting small and then growing loud enough to be audible to me. He muttered hateful words to himself between overly-dramatic weeping. I returned to him; he sat on the floor surrounded by broken objects, an image I would forever keep in my mind as a perfect embodiment of his life. I did not hesitate to sit down beside him in the pile of what was now trash and what was likely trash to begin with.
    “I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. I’m such a fucking asshole, I’m just so fucking fucked up, fuck!” His voice was filled with resentment, heavy and broken, “I’m a sorry ass sack of crap, son of a fucking bitch. I can’t fucking control myself, you know? I just- I get these ideas in my head and I can’t fucking stop myself. I’m an asshole, a mother fucking asshole! What is wrong with me?” He pounded the ground with his fist, an empty thud on cheap linoleum.
    I didn’t know what I could say to console him other than agree with him, “Even though all of that is true, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. You know, I have this crazy theory that you don’t have to be what people deem to be stable to be a good person. I don’t think anyone’s stable, I don’t think anyone’s happy, I don’t think anyone knows what they’re here for, and they all try to fucking hide it. You’re different, you don’t hide it, and you don’t pretend that you like anything about anyone or even about yourself, and even though you live in a trailer and manufacture drugs you’re probably the most genuine person I’ve ever met, and I think that’s pretty admirable.”
    Before I knew it I had gone into one of my rants on the meaning of life that I usually only indulged in whilst under the influence of alcohol. I inhaled a large amount of air to make up for all of the talking I had done, and I strangely felt my eyes beginning to water and immediately suppressed it.
    After a moment of absolute quietness he expressed himself to me with a distinguished tone of honesty, “I’m afraid that you’ll leave me.”
    I felt the bothersome lump in my throat rising as the guilt flooded my body. Not only did I know my departure was inevitable, but I now knew how painful it would be, and I could not bring myself to tell him I would never leave him no matter how much I wanted to, simply because I could not bring myself to lie to him.
    Instead I held him, trying to avoid the inevitable and push terrible thoughts from my mind. I told him that I never wanted to leave him, because it was the truth, and I hoped more than anything that it would suffice.