We Know the Way, We are Lost

Jim Ruland
· in ,

We find you everywhere we look. Washed up on the beach. Stashed inside of a cold oven. In the back seat of a sedan with no doors. We cover you with whatever we can find. Old jackets and moldy tarps. The stitched-up battle flags of our youth. But it’s never enough.

We worry you’ll be found, taken from us, destroyed. We worry what will happen if others stumble upon you like we have. We can’t have them know what we can’t bring ourselves to admit. So we worry because we didn’t worry enough when we had the chance. We are coming apart at the dreams and we are fearful and afraid of that last image of you getting stuck there. So awful. So final. We couldn’t bear to look. Now we can’t stop searching for you.

We add this to our list of regrets, getting longer with each rumor and revelation. There isn’t enough skin on our bodies to list them all. We ink our stupid feelings so we can carry you with us into battles we were born to lose, so that we never have to say goodbye.

We listen to tapes, now older than we were when we made them. If we listen closely we can hear the hiss of the needle underneath the music, and it triggers something beyond all the blackouts, way past rest and resolution, between this place and no place, and we wonder: Is this what it sounds like where you are?

We call out your name and drown in the sound until our eyes crash closed.

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Jim Ruland’s flash fictions have appeared in a number of publications, including The Collagist, Creative Science Quarterly, Del Sol Review, Dossier, elimae, Esquire, The Fanzine, Keyhole, Like Water Burning, McSweeney’s, Mississippi Review, Quick Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, Surgery of Modern Warfare, Vocabula Review, Wigleaf, and the anthology Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak.