“My glasses are projecting a memory from the physical universe on the sky above,” I whispered to Angel.
“Actually, you’re picking up the signal from the library with your glasses and pulling in the security footage. I could see the wayward signal myself right here.”
“Wayward signal?” I glanced at Angel.
“Didn’t you have everything locked securely behind all those firewalls and other protective passwords? Nothing should be leaving the library right now, right?” The eyes on the left side of his neck were firmly fixed on me, the rest of them were either fixed on the sky or looking straight above into space.
“Right… I thought Misty had to go behind so many checkpoints before being able to view any of it.”
“Welp…it looks like something’s leaked because we can clearly pick up a signal of a replay right here.”
I watched the replay and turned up the volume to pick up the audio of it. I instantly blushed and looked at Angel. “Angel, not these!”
“Ah…well, I can’t stop it. Someone’s pulling it and projecting it somewhere else.”
I turned back to the projection to watch in horror as short, broken clips pulled me back to the beginning of it all.
Nick and I drove over the incredibly long Chesapeake Bay bridge in our Ford Explorer Sport Trac hoping to Jesus that this time, we would get down in one piece. I turned up the radio to drown out the small skids the truck was making with the back wheels and the constant reminder that at any given time, like that shopping cart with one wheel that never made contact with the ground, we too were driving down from Pennsylvania to Virginia on three wheels.
“There for me there for me, said you’d be there for me…” I belted overtop of the tiny screeches along with Lauryn Hill while feeling every bit of the song toward my truck, and toward the mechanic who said he fixed it. The 2007 model truck had only been in my possession for one year. It only needed an oil change, so my car indicated, and to be a model citizen, I dropped it off at the dealer. Two thousand dollars later, I was in the hole with a truck that the dealer magically found with a “temporarily fixed” problem. Or so we thought it was temporarily fixed. Drive anywhere 60 miles and above, and we were “wobbly-shopping-carting” down the highway with my heart in my throat.
With the help of Jesus and a few more songs from Ms. Lauryn Hill, Nick and I made it to our destination: a friends’ home. I was there to dog sit the friends’ dogs while Nick was off to study carbine training with the friend, while his wife had to visit family in California. It seemed like a simple enough trip. Our friends’ two female pit bulls greeted us with kisses and thwacking tail wags. Before the wife left for her trip, she ran through a quick tour of her home and asked me about my experience with dogs since the pit bulls seemed to love me.
“Oh, I’ve only had two dogs in the past. One when I was about six years old and another when I was about sixteen. I made a bet with my dad that I could finish a 5,000 piece puzzle in 3 days. He said that if I could finish it in that time, he’d get me a dog. (And to this day, I have no idea what puzzle building has anything to do with dogs.) But he got me one. His name was Shiloh. He was a Boxer-Shepherd mix. I loved him deeply.”
“Oh! Really! That’s an incredible story.”
“Yeah. He really was quite a personality. Was about as tall as me right before he passed at nine months old…”
“Oh, no! I’m so sorry!”
“No, don’t worry about it. I’m over it now. It was a long time ago. Hit and run. My siblings tied him outside because he was barking nonstop. He chewed through his leash and ran across the street to see the girl pup there. I don’t think the driver saw him at all or stopped to check. The vet at least says he didn’t suffer.”
The following few days, after everyone had left on their trips, I attempted one last ditch effort to fix my dying truck. I dropped it off at a nearby mechanics and Ubered back for a weekend with just me and the pups. In the quiet of it all, I attempted to start relaxing and resetting. I read some self-help books and tried to watch a documentary on Black food culture. Later that night, after sitting through so much quiet and self-reflection, I turned to Pepper, the younger of the two pitties, looked her dead in her loving eyes and said, “Hey…thanks for loving me anyway…”
And that’s when I broke. Years and years of deep, uncried tears for just about anything and everything under the sun came, and I couldn’t stop, and they continued as I picked up my car and paid the mechanic another thousand dollars only for him to say, “Sorry, it’s unfixable.” They kept coming down as Nick and I drove out of the Chesapeake Bay tunnel on our way back home to Pennsylvania. They continued to pour days later as we got another opinion from another mechanic saying that they believe the frame of the truck is bent and it’s unfit to be driven. I lamented so hard that the following weekend all I could handle watching on TV was silent YouTube videos of people camping in the rain. The tears kept coming as Nick and I made the hard decision to impulse buy another four year old truck that put us nearly another $50k in debt.
This level of sadness was ridiculous. I had never experienced sadness so deep that it felt nearly impossible to function in front of business partners as Nick and I drove back down the same route from Pennsylvania to Ocean City, Maryland a week later. I had a headache. Actually, I felt achy all over. While mindlessly watching all of those rain camping videos, I had a migraine, but I didn’t think anything of it. I get migraines all the time. A week of a migraine? I mean…it must be from all the grief? Right? I thought as I rubbed my head and jumped out of the new truck the first night we stayed in OCMD. Nick wanted to help me take my mind off of things, so he insisted we go to a movie theater. I took him up on the offer. As I walked around the truck to grab Nick’s hand, my left leg twisted to the left and went weak instantly. I stumbled like someone who was drunk, but caught myself. Yep… I’m losing it. Gotta find a way to stop crying so much, Brittany.
After the movie, I had the bright idea to grab the largest, sweetest canned alcoholic beverage from the nearest gas station. I was insistent that I find one with the highest amount of alcohol. This one that I found had 40%. Great. Back at our apartment with other business partners, I opened the beverage, said, “Whatever. Who cares anyway?”, and downed the whole thing in one sitting.
The next set of projections on the northern sky were fuzzy and brown. Snippets of a toilet, laughing hysterically, everyone being friendly…or was that concerned? Nick carrying me back to the bedroom…to the toilet? To the bed? Wait, was I upside down? Or right side up? I felt like I was walking on the ceiling somehow. Or was it the floor…? And it was all so funny for some reason. Euphoria! Finally! Only to be greeted by the world’s largest hangover in the morning.
The memories shifted back to color as the emotional tone of the footage jolted from hopeful to hopeless again. I attempted to sit through the business seminar setting the example with my husband that I could focus through an eight hour training. But my head was throbbing like nothing I had ever seen before and Oh my God! What had I just done? For the first time in my life, I was officially over $100k in bad debt.
At the thought, “You are over $100k in bad debt”, I shot right up. It felt like someone had put a knife into my right temple. I couldn’t breathe. “I’ll be right back,” I managed to whisper to Nick. He nodded and let me pass through. I ran to the nearest public restroom and silently wept. “What the heck did I get myself into?” I thought to myself. I began to hyperventilate. Hold yourself together! I yelled at myself internally. It took a miracle but somehow, the tears stopped enough to let me walk out of the bathroom and back into the lobby.
On my way back to my seat, I happened to pass by a table where a financial adviser was promoting software that could get you out of debt in the shortest amount of time. I stopped, “Maybe you can help me.”
“Sure,” he offered in a friendly tone. “Do you know how much debt you’re in?”
“Sure do. And I’ve got the details right here.” I handed him my phone. Being the organized person I was, I had my numbers ready and on a spreadsheet for him to crunch.
“Well, based on this, you could get out of debt in four years!”
I looked at him once again euphoric and then…broken. I couldn’t explain it. And the well just wouldn’t run dry. The tears continued to flow once more. He smiled compassionately and offered me a tissue. “It’s okay! So many clients of mine cry when they see how quickly they can get out of debt.”
I nodded, but didn’t offer any other words. I was glad there was hope… but at what cost?
Later that day, the ability to breathe still didn’t come easy to me. A few of my business partners came around and saw how stressed I was. “Hey, if you need a gummy or a hit, I got you,” one offered.
I thanked them for their kind offer. I know they only wanted to see me relax, and I was so close to taking them up on it.
“We won’t need any,” Nick had overheard and stepped in. I still remained silent. “We’re heading home soon anyway.”
The day we drove home in our brand-new-to-us truck, a gale passed through the beach town. Crossing the bridge from the island to the mainland, I watched the choppy, unforgiving waters. I noticed some fishermen in the bay; their small boat tossing like a toy boat in a bathtub. I thought back to the Great Wave mural I had displayed in my office and asked through a new set of silent tears, “Are these struggling fishermen struggling for air like I am, right now?”
The clips suddenly stopped. My breath matched that of myself in the displayed memory. “Your inhales stopped,” Angel observed.
I shook my head and let in a sharp one. “Watching all of that…I couldn’t breathe,” I turned to look at him.
“You couldn’t breathe? Or you wouldn’t breathe?” Angel lowered his arms, closed the eyes on his arms, pulled down his sleeves and faced me.
I didn’t answer him right away as I searched my soul for the answer to his question. “That…those…memories left me breathless and speechless,” I finally responded. I tapped my glasses off once more and Angel transformed back into the edgy and tattooed Director of Death that I knew him as. I felt woozy.
He crossed over to me and placed a hand on my back to help me stabilize my balance. “Come, we’ll be late to our next meeting.”
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Just Brittany 