He said that we would be fine. Even though those words are spoken by everyone in doubt of themselves, I still trusted him. Pushing down my instinct—that feeling where your stomach caves in on itself— I tried to ignore that gut-wrenching sensation that a dog might get before an earthquake. 

He said that we would be guided alongside the old railroad line that travels north just out of Colorado. The rusty tracks, left behind in the age of coal miners, once held shiny new cars, but now they only have lifeless metal boxes that lay abandoned. Those workers traveled to Hell. Men would board these once lively train cars but then entered into their dead wooden coffins once they died in those horrible mines. A feeling of drowning in a now unknowable sorrow could overtake anyone in the mental state to think about such horrors. The railway tracks flowed river-like twisting and bending with the asphalt. Like rushing water, it shaped the white and yellow lines of the roadway on the ascension up the mountain.

He said that winter wasn’t supposed to come this early. Mid-June was an odd place for anywhere to snow, even in the mountainous and wintery state of Colorado that we were just leaving. Normality was upheaved as the wind howled too loud, too soon. Fall was yet to come, but our breaths still froze as we breathed. The Earth sang out of tune, belting the dissonant tones of the winter’s snow.

He said that the mountain we drove over wasn’t that tall—that it wasn’t that narrow. The towering rock lifted up the asphalt too high to be able to travel past the woodlands below. There was an imposing number of feet stating just how long it would take to reach the hard ground and to be crushed under the weight of your own car. The pavement we glided across was more akin to a slim, slender stream than a broad, powerful river. Once, he was a mighty river, but now our road trickled just wide enough to let us through.

He said that he could see fine through all the specks of snow that blinded the front windshield. Light stopped just short of the ground in the frozen fog and racing snowflakes. The flurry swallowed any sliver of visibility like the hunger that he had for more than what he was given. Even in the motion of falling ice, his arrogance drove him. All the movement of the tiny diamonds blinded him, but, still,  he didn’t drive at a steady pace.

He said that he wasn’t too tired, but his eyes drooped low and sad; a persistent yawning rose and fell like waves on the beach where our wedding took place. He claimed that the yawns weren’t a signal that he couldn’t drive any longer, but the tiredness also rose and fell like the tides that washed away our footprints. All those sorry nights added up to a drained man, drifting in and out of sleep while his hands loosely gripped the wheel.

He said that he loved me. I played a movie in my head of all those restless nights when he didn’t lay beside me. So familiar was I with the word disregard that the sound of it felt fake on my lips. But if words could be familiarized with people, then lonely would have known me better than he knew me.

He said that I couldn’t drive, that I wasn’t allowed to take the wheel and feel the unnecessarily bought leather beneath my hands. Only one person was in charge in this relationship, and that person was the one who drove wobbly down a clouded pathway thousands of feet up on the side of some old mining town’s mountain. What if I drove instead? Would I have been safer to get past the rocky and white cliffside?

He said that this would be the last time we had to move. All our stuff packed into the back of the car jostled around along the way to our next temporary destination. The duffle bags sliding against each other made the sound of shuffling canvas that I was so used to. Maybe I still believed him then, but he said that we wouldn’t move again! He said those same words the time before we came to Colorado, and before we went to California, and before we went to Vermont, and before every f*cking place previous to all those bullsh*t apartments in desolate areas of all those dismal counties!

He said that he didn’t gamble all our money away. He said that over and over and over again until our debt reached too high a number, and we had to run away again. And then he said that we could reset our lives and that he would change to be a better man. 

He said that every time we moved. He was always a “different” man. 

They say that the town that we just left is called Telluride because the miners would say “To Hell You Ride.” The conditions were so bad that people described it as a nether region; those men descended downward into just one town, but everywhere I go with him I’m riding into that Hell. 

He said that he wasn’t drunk, but the smell of liquor around him hung thick like a cloud drifting lazily in the air. I smelled it. His face was always too close to mine that I could see all the lies in his teeth, so his breath, so foul that you would think it was from a rotting corpse, always drifted around me. Even without the beer, he had the stench of a bad man. 

On that final night when we drove over that frosted mountain road, he said that we would live together happily.

He said that we would be fine on that snowy summer’s day,

and I believed that we would be fine

before that turn when the car slipped on the ice.