Turtles

By Gabrielle Wells 

The only useful light source around was the music menu on his dashboard displaying the album cover of a Bon Iver album. Late summer air coated in dewey moss and crisp pines rushed in through the windows. My hair whipped around the passenger seat as I rested my head against the matte leather headrest and took in the moment with shaky breaths. The cool balmy air stroked along the slopes of my cheekbones as if preemptively swiping away the heralding call of tears. Reminding me the road would not disappear upon our absence.  

We’d already been driving down that winding road for nearly 30 minutes, but hidden places would not be revered if not buried in sprays of untamed wildflowers and assemblies of hushed maples. A concealed driveway is what he turned onto and wound up a steep gravel hill that led to a dirt paved clearing and a quaint religious preschool amidst the forest. He worked at the preschool during the school year for an internship class and took me on a drive out there once we graduated. We were gone from any visible world, although nobody was around to experience it at the nocturnal hour of 12 am anyways. There was no true concept of time whenever we were nestled in that enclosure of greenery, we were allowed to forget about what tomorrow brought as there are only intertwined branches and fingers alike acknowledged there.  

The hum of his engine cut with the jerk of his key, and we were left in the congregation of crickets singing in tandem with the metronomic rustle of leaves. We never usually talked on the way to the preschool since we found solace in the silence with every swaying bend of the asphalt. Due to our preferred meditations, starting a conversation post drive was awkward and typically began with the proclamation of a spontaneous thought.   

 “There are turtles over there. Would you like to see them?” He abruptly whispered and pointed just beyond the sparse layer of saplings illuminated by his dimmed headlights. 

The question was startling considering the fact we’d sat in the car there plenty of times together and he’d never mentioned anything about the existence of turtles in the area.  

“Why have you never told me there were turtles here?” I asked in an exasperated breath.  

“You didn’t answer my question,” he bluntly replied.  

“Yes, I would like to see them,” I admitted.  

He climbed out of the driver’s seat and strode his way over to the passenger door as I hopped down from the passenger seat.  

“Where am I going?” I continued to pester. 

“Just follow.” He attempted to reassure me with a small laugh.  

I was not assured. “I can’t see,” I countered into the inky void of air in front of me.  

He proceeded to maneuver himself behind me and placed a hand gently between my shoulder blades to guide me forward towards the trees. His cell phone flashlight only reached so far, but within a couple yards it caught on a wooden frame encased in chicken wire.  

“Oh my God there’s turtles here.” I rasped while tugging on His tattered sweatshirt behind me.  

“Like I said,” he quipped back.  

Kneeling down in front of the enclosure, he motioned for me to do the same and our shoulders huddled into each other in order to gain a similar view.  

“That one is Shelly curled up against the divider,” he said and waved his flashlight in the direction of a shell adorned with hexagonal swirls of earthy greens and browns.  

I appreciated her ability to remain so still upon the disruption of her sleep. She lay solitary in her burrow of leaves, unbothered by the two beasts who dared to come observe her while the moon still took hold of the sky. Her shell rested snug against a plank of wood that ran as a divider down the middle of the enclosure. There were splintered scratches along her side of the plank that were shallow and lacked a remarkable length. I assumed it was from brushing up against the wood while shifting around before sleeping. I would soon be given a sadder conclusion. My off-putting hush began to permeate the air around him and he cleared his throat in discomfort. My focus was brought back to his shoulder and sunk further into mine radiating an intimate warmth.  

“Why are they divided?” I questioned sadly.  

“Why are who divided?” he responded.  

“The turtles,” I replied.  

“Male and female,” he answered.  

“Oh,” I murmured.  

I didn’t verbalize it, but I was disappointed by that answer. It was a very logical answer, but I just wished there were a different reason. A reason like one turtle had a murderous vendetta against the other or they were very talented in concocting plans to escape together. Unfortunately, that was not the case, they were simply divided due to their biological affinity of being drawn towards one another.  

We realized after a while that we should leave the two turtles alone as they likely wanted to sleep on their own despite our own insomniac tendencies. The conversation flowed easily for a while, but doomsday still lurked beyond the trees and limited what we were willing to confess.  

My eyes focused on the sunroof and our reflection visible from the light provided by his dashboard. His hair was a riot of straight pale blond stands swept across his forehead and his eyes were zeroed in on my reflection.  

“It’s disappointing there’s no stars tonight. I usually love the view. You can’t even see anything,” I whispered.  

“I can see something,” he whispered back.  

“And what would that be?”  

“Well, I can see my reflection…  And I can see yours next to mine… I suppose it’s a beautiful view even without the stars,” he said.  

I speechlessly had to agree with him. I continued to roam my eyes over his form and watched his pointer finger connect with the tip of my nose, so I closed my eyes and immersed myself in the path he began to trace. The soft pad of his finger gently stroked across my eyelids and every defining feature in its path. My cheekbones, my chin, the creases in my furrowed brows, and the clenched base of my jaw. He caressed around the edges of my lips before resting on the plump center of my bottom lip. The only notable sounds were heavy breaths from both sides of the car when a hot tear streaked down my face that he subtly wiped away. Even as they kept pouring down, his fingers wiped them away, unwilling to let them gather in the hollow of my throat. Shuddering breaths and shoulder tensing sobs overtook me, but I still kept restraint. Never completely allowing myself to break down.  

“I knew this goodbye was going to be hard.” He gravely offered.  

I pathetically whimpered in agreement as the tears spilled thicker and constricted my vocal cords. 

“We’re gonna be alright. I’ll take you out here any night you ask once we’re home again,” he said as if he were pleading with me.  

I still could only tearfully hiccup in response. Hearing him try to diffuse the desperate tone of his voice with huffs of halfhearted laughter left me aching.  

“I’m not gonna be alright, nothing feels alright.” I choked out.  

“That’s perfectly fine,” he responded, and I believed him for the time being.  

I crashed the hardest when he drove me back to my house and parked across the street. My neighborhood was desolate with no lingering signs of life. Streetlights flickering through the haze hovering over the road and cicadas dully droned the tune of the sleepy suburbs. All souls were comfortably asleep and unaware that the world that I knew was dwindling before my eyes. We sat in silence. Not the comfortable kind like when we drove to the preschool. The kind of nauseating silence where you feel in your bones there are blows soon to be taken. Our heads turned towards each other, and we could only watch each other’s faces fall under the crushing weight of realization.  

“I feel like I should give you a hug or something.” I lamely offered.  

“Would you like a hug?” He cautiously asked.  

I only nodded in response and heard the unclicking of his seatbelt. I was promptly enveloped in his arms with an intensely firm hold. There are times I’ve been hugged by family members, but that was the first time I truly felt like I was being held by someone who understood what it meant to hold. We latched onto each other like lifelines, and I felt his fingers attempting to find grip on any part of my back that was able to be grasped. He was always one for seeming cold and lacking vulnerability in any regard. But I felt his warmth and the way it overtook the  

freezing terror that slid through me.  I squeezed as tight as possible as our necks aligned and naturally curved into another. His pulse connected to mine; I could feel it hammering wildly into my own. He was just as scared, behind every levelheaded reply, he was just as terrified. We held onto each other for nearly 5 minutes and only broke when my mom texted to ask why we were dormant outside.  

There was nothing really more to say than goodbye, but I looked at him for a bit longer as it would be a while before I saw the same features again. It was not the time for revealing the feelings buried for months. It was not the time for promising we’d wait for each other. It was not the time to tear open things tightly sealed away. Unveiling the unspoken level of our interactions would not change the 8 hours between Purdue, Indiana and Bradford, Pennsylvania.  He solemnly smiled and did the same scanning over me and our eyes met one last time.  

“Goodnight, Blake,” was all I could bring myself to say. 

“Goodnight, Wells,” was all I needed to hear echoed from him before I opened the passenger door and shut it behind me, punctuating the end of a story that never really got to begin.  

He left a couple hours later in the delicate hours of morning. I sluggishly packed my boxes over the course of a week. Home was only a reminder of what I no longer had that suffocatingly bore down on me. I could only see the roads through the lens of his passenger seat even while I was the one driving. My eyes were blurred over with tears midway through my drives though, so it doesn’t even matter where I was in the car. I shouldn’t have been driving in the first place. He’d driven me everywhere and from that fact was a deeply selfish regret I ever entered his car in the first place in December. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t see every road with his profile in my peripheral vision. 

I hadn’t realized it was possible to experience that intense grief when he didn’t even die. However, I grieved my naive ideas of what could have been. I grieved the constant that was him who I spent my teenage years wishing for with every birthday candle. I was forced to silently reminisce over old photos he refused to smile for.  Grief stricken and curled up on my childhood bedroom floor, I awaited my own departure he seemingly so easily conquered.  

Arriving in Bradford I began to think of the sleeping turtle and how tight she curled against the scratched border in the middle of the enclosure. I no longer believe she was undisturbed as we watched her sleep, I believe she did not react as it did not change the situation she was placed in. Confined to a box, forced to watch the world she once knew through rusted chicken wire. I do not feel the need to react to any of my surroundings lately, I only watch while nestled behind a group of girls I pretend I know. I am confined to a place I do not call home and barred off from the one who made me reactive. The one who knew which words to say that would ignite a fight in me. There is no longer a spark flowing through my veins as I tuck myself away in a cradle of blankets. I cling to the wall that keeps me close to him. The wall where polaroids are tacked down above my pillow.  

For now, I lie in wait for my flight home when leaves crunch beneath my feet and mothers call from the front door as the smell of pumpkin pie wafts from the threshold. When I can see the boy with a sly grin whose depraved jokes are a piece of what I call home. Only then will I be satisfied when I am given the chance to go back down a road alive with maples and knowing silence. Go back to the turtle and sympathize with her rather than ogle as myself and many others have before. She understands what it is like to feel so isolated that sleeping with your head to a wall is the only thing that resembles comfort in a foreign location.