Untitled: suggestions?

He was never mine, even after the seasons melted into one another and his favorite photograph of New York’s highway 95 tarnished at the edges. He took me there once; he showed me why he left. I thought it was beautiful while we stood on that overpass, fingers interlaced into the chain link fence. We stood atop the grandest Christmas tree in the world, our porcelain faces radiating in the yielding darkness with our wings suspended behind us. We could have flown over that railing and headfirst into emancipated bewilderment but instead, we just glowed. I wanted to laugh as toy trucks zoomed beneath our feet, their momentum gently rocking the traffic lights, our gracefully dangling ornaments.
In my admiration for such a place, I nearly missed the looming apprehension sprawled across that angelic face of his. We weren’t in the city because I wanted to see the pretty lights beam at me and I wanted to beam back. Ethan made me get in the car and I headed north as he slept in the back seat with that photo evenly placed between his palms, draped in some sort of serenity that I only ever saw when he was unconscious. I drove three hundred miles with him like that, careful to turn and break with great care so we could maintain the first silence we’d shared in recent weeks that couldn’t be sliced with a sharp enough blade.
As I approached our exit, I reached behind and grabbed his leg, shaking firmly to wake him. “What way?”
“What way gets us across the Hudson from lower Manhattan?” he groggily questioned.
“You’re the one who lived here. You wanted to show me this.”
He suppressed his belligerence with a low grumble, that sound he always made when he didn’t want to give me an answer. The closer to when he’d woken up, the lower his octave and the higher my dissatisfaction. Somewhere between four and five PM on a Monday, Wednesday or Thursday, it was always tolerable to hear him groan like that. I’d pour the remaining capsules into my hand and count them in pairs, and he’d grumble again. It didn’t matter if he danced in circles around too many Prozacs or how many hours of sleep he’d gotten the night before.
It was the nights when I knew exactly how long he’d slept when I closed my eyes and suffered through that incomprehensible mumble. Fucking inertia. We went from a hundred and ten in a residential to zero; we were endorphins and synapses firing blanks from muskets. I never would have wanted a little cabinet for me, a reliable change of clothes at his place for my morning drive home, regardless of what I usually came dressed in. Although I didn’t know much, I knew a name, a face and a folder of psychological records—enough to take all appeal out of smelling like his natural scent and somehow adapting it for my own.
I often made coffee while he slept since he was somehow unfazed by the sunbeams crawling inside from every unprotected doorway or window. He didn’t have a single grain of sugar in his entire apartment, and that actually mattered to me then. I stood ten feet from his bedside and took a quiet moment to admire his shoulder blade illuminated from the horizontal slivers of light emanating through the blinds. Once again irritated with my sugarless coffee, I then I woke him.
That’s when the grumble came, when I flew over the dashboard and through the window and onto the street. I even skidded a few times, and I still have the road rash on my hands to stand for it. Fucking inertia.
“Ethan, this isn’t okay.” Grumble. “I don’t think we should do this anymore.”
“Oh hell, should we do this. I trust you ‘cause of it.” He coughed while sliding closer to the right side of his bed, having strayed from that familiar territory sometime in the early morning hours. He slid farther from me.
“Why though? You talked to me fine.” Grumble. “Why does it change anything? I don’t want this.”
“Yes you do.”
“I don’t, though.” Another grumble. “I really don’t. I don’t want to be the shrink who can’t help anybody, so she does this.”
“I hate that word.” He muttered with the majority of his mouth still pressed against his pillow and slightly open, his eyes closed. After a few moments of silence, he opened them again with unbelievable speed, the lens open and ready to capture the instance of weakness he knew I would have. With a blink, he clicked, and I was caught on film as raw as I ever come.
I pressed my shoulders together behind, adding a little more dignified strain in my collarbones. “Psychologist, fine. But I’m not-- I’m the shrink who can’t help anybody so she fucks.”
He’d grumble, and I’d pick up my keys from his nightstand and walk towards the door.

I then soon discovered that Ethan made effort an unmade bed and bleached socks. There were more Vicodin prescriptions in his glove compartment than on the shelves of the pharmacy that gave them to him, yet their plastic seals were all unbroken. He swallowed one aspirin a day that almost took the sharpest of the edge off in his shoulder, usually right after he combed his hair, one hundred exact strokes each morning.
Yet those unopened pills started two weeks after I did. I was a better psychologist in the early stages than I’d been my whole career and he never spoke a single word to me once we left my office. I became him at night; he resonated through my insides and pulsed through my veins and out again, as syncopated feeling and thinking and believing. The code was quite predictable: fast was anxious, violent was angry, deliberate was inquisitive for passion. I began to know him in those weeks right before the real pills. Ten years of spherical coffee talk and elongated silences, and I finally knew him.

“Is there anything you can tell me about where we’re going? How to get there’s a start.” I anxiously rubbed my thumb along the inside seam of the steering wheel.
“I only vaguely know where we are right now.”
“That doesn’t mean I know this city; you do. I just want to get there so we can grab a bite up here before we head back.” I hesitated. “Can’t do that unless we get there.”
“It’s really not that exciting, and food can wait,” he said, audibly shifting his weight in the back seat.
“I’m hungry.”
He coughed. “So am I.”
“Where the hell do I go?” I snapped. To know Ethan, I figured, was to gain real understanding of your own patience.
“Right in 2 lights, I think.”
“And then?”
“I’ve got to see it,” he said with a hint of irritation in his voice. “I can’t see it from here.” He paused. “At the speed you’re going, I’m surprised you’re charging me by hour instead of by mile.”
“Who says I’m charging you? I think of this as a courtesy thing.”
“I always assume you’re charging unless we’re at my place,” he said dryly. I heard a faint shuffling from the back seat as he sat upright.
It took me a moment to tame the heat rising up into my chest, so I let his words settle before nearly whispering, “that makes me feel like more of a whore than it should.”
“That’s not what I was getting at at all.” His voice lightly quivered. “At all.”
“The point is,” my fingers clenched, “that this is a courtesy thing.”
I could feel his eyes burning through the back of my head, through my hair and into my brain, as if staring at me as intensely as he always did would somehow make my mind more easily legible. “Are we friends? Really?”
“You’re my client.”
“Am I some kind of lo-“
“No.”
“Lover?”
“No.” Silence. “Where to?”
He gave me an intersection to plug into my GPS and then retreated back into his sullen disquietude. The psychologist told me that I just filled him with an overwhelming sense of emptiness that you can only feel when losing something you never had to begin with. The lover told me that he just abandoned the game, the fruitless chase because the mouse finally ran into that hole in the wall and the cat was left in the open with filthy paws.
We eventually got to that overpass, and I truly did love the view from up there for a while. It liberated me, the warm and intensified light that shone upon the green exit sign and somehow found my face: white, pure and not the least bit menacing. I stood atop the greatest of all edifices, and I alone was illuminated for whoever bothered to look up at me. It was him and me, alone, atop the grandest Christmas tree in the world, but for all I cared, it was me alone who radiated.
He broke my captivation: “I don’t like it here.”
“I think it’s quite beautiful, actually,” I stated, seconds before jolting back into full-fledged consciousness, etching the outline of the manila folder in my office with his name on it into the forefront of my mind. “You don’t. Why?”
Grumble. “I don’t want to be here.”
“Then why are we?”
He leaned forward into the chain link fence, pushing all his weight against the rusted iron while gripping the threads with everything he had. His eyes danced in their desperate attempt to follow each passing car, darting from one to the next until he finally fixated on the fast lane. As each car brightly flew underneath us, Ethan involuntarily blinked, jolted by such an imposition ruining all the black.
He smirked: “why not?” His knuckles grew paler.
I watched him for a few minutes. That face said it all, now that I know why he clung onto that fence like he did. It was the best of times to observe him, while his upper lip retreated further and further underneath his top teeth with every moment we spent there in silence. I could feel him in that surreal way again; I could feel his pulse rising to catch up with the speed of his eyes, still chasing after whatever they could below us. His eyes were losing.

“You know how every kid is scared of roller coasters for a while?” he asked. “I fucking loved ‘em. I wanted to design them or build them for a while, I loved ‘em that much.” He looked at me for a split second and with my nod, he focused on the cars again. “Everyone can scream on them and that’s what’s supposed to happen. And if you’re the one not screaming, no one gives a shit because they’re too busy enjoying the ride. No one’s gonna look at you like you’re crazy because no one’s looking at you at all.”
“You don’t like to be looked at?”
“I’m alright with it now.” His grip loosened on the chain link fence. Car after car weaved in and out of the dotted white lines and he kept chasing them. “My parents used to look at me too much because they knew I’d just stop for a minute or two and they wanted to wait it out with me. But sometimes I’d drool and that’s when other people would look. A few times I shook, but just a tiny bit. Everyone hears ‘seizures’ and they think of these crazy convulsions. I never had those but I had a ton of seizures.
“And I could almost feel them coming, I swear I could. It’s this split second of anticipation that’s almost scarier than the thing itself. I don’t know if I just didn’t have enough time or if I didn’t have the balls, but I hated myself for not shouting or something, letting people know what was going to come. That’s so much of what’s weird about them—you can’t prepare yourself to lose all control. It might’ve been relieving that way. It wouldn’t have plagued me… but that’s another thing, how people seemed to think that they could catch it or something. They’d get unnerved when I randomly went still. They acted like it was so traumatizing for them to not know exactly what to expect out of me, even my teachers did. If I could’ve warned them, then it wouldn’t have been a damn plague for any of us.
“But I grew out of them. All kids do when its absence epilepsy. But I was always scared of that feeling. It’s nauseating. I don’t wanna feel that ever aga—“
“Ethan, get down.”
He had slowly ascended up the fence and when I finally noticed it, he already had one leg over the railing. He swung his other one around and fully faced the freeway, ten feet above me on the chain link fence. He was the one with all the potential in the world to radiate, now a dejected porcelain angel with all the Yuletide lights fighting for him. They make porcelain look paler.
“Do you know what it’s like?” he paused, stealing a huge breath of cold life from the city, “to feel insane? I tried,” he began, “to be nobody else’s problem anymore. But I swore I felt that feeling while I was driving on this overpass and I hadn’t felt it for over twenty years. But I’m telling you that it happened and I would’ve had one, I swear to God. It’s nauseating, it makes me want to die… I didn’t want to have them anymore and I didn’t know what to do and there was a car in front of me and I didn’t want anything to happen to him and— it seemed right to drive off.”
The angel cried.
“Marissa,” he began, softly tilting his jaw towards me. “Marissa, there’s a cross down there for them. Amy Sanford, thirty-four, and Michael Sanford, three. I walked out with a shitty shoulder.” Digging his heels deeper into two holes within the fence, he held on to it a little tighter.
“Give me one good reason to get down.”
The psychologist told me that it was my job and moral duty to save any patient from his or herself. The lover didn’t speak because she knew that she was never much of a lover at all. For the first time, he was listening to me:
“Of all of the people in this world, you chose me to be here to watch you die. Get off the fence. You have living to do.”
I drove home alone.