Author's Note: This is like part II to Ride, #75, and it may suck and if so, just forget you ever read this.
Day Two-Hundred Five: Born to Die by Lana Del Rey
If there was one thing she had learned in her whole life, it's that life was ephemeral; it was brief. It was sometimes sweet. It could be bitter. It was transient; it was never eternal. All people were born to die.
In fact…nothing was eternal. Everything ended. There would come a time when her feet would just give out from right under her. She was hoping that wasn't anytime soon, though. She just found someone she wanted to spend some time with. It would never be forever—she knew that; she could never have someone to spend forever with—but some time was good enough. She feared every coming step, knowing that eventually, she would run out of steps. There was a certain number of steps, a certain number of seconds—maybe years, maybe months, maybe days, maybe only hours—that she had to live. Once it was over…it was over. She feared every step would be her last.
For once, she wanted to get where they were going, wherever that was. She wanted him and his companionship, as selfish as she felt for admitting it.
She sat on the ground outside of a convenience store, waiting for Toby outside. He walked out a moment later and she hopped on her feet. They began walking down to the little motel they were staying at. Like before, they had been hopping all around big and small towns on the West Coast.
It was a Friday. Before, Fridays made her feel like a million years old. She was the only twenty-three year-old girl she knew who spent every Friday alone. Some days, she was surrounded by people, but she always felt like the only person in the world. She used to think that was just a weird occurrence, but maybe fate had always wanted it to be that way so she could find the one person who challenged all of that. She found the one guy who made her feel like she wasn't alone for once. He felt like home.
"Spencer."
She looked over as he opened the pack of cigarettes he had just bought. He took one out and gave it to her. She handed him a lighter and he lit it for her. After she took a drag, she passed the cigarette over to him. Although she knew that smoking was technically not a drug, she couldn't help but feel subdued and relaxed whenever she smoked. In her mind, its effects were equal to those of drugs.
"Baby," he said as he took her hand. She smiled at that. After so long, she finally had someone she wanted to have call her his baby. She read once that being called "Baby" had a positive effect on the female brain. She'd never been called "baby" prior to him and she liked it.
She took the cigarette back. He began to tell her jokes and make her laugh. She liked the laughter. It helped her carry on when the days got long and began to drag on. He was fun to be around. She hand fun with him in the time she still had left. She'd like to think they could transcend transience, and although she knew it could never happen, she liked to dream.
She let the cigarette hang loosely in her mouth as she shuffled a deck of cards. She smiled slightly as she looked at the different cards. She caught a little glimpse of him changing in the bathroom and smiled again, but wider this time. The cards were one way they made the time pass by, especially when they were at their wits' end with each other.
She used to play cards with her family. That was just about one of the only things she preserved from her childhood. She spent most of it lost or confused or both. She just took what she could get because she never knew what she'd get the next day or the day after that.
He walked out a moment later and sat across from her. She dealt the cards and began to play with him, like she'd done a thousand times prior. She felt like this was the last time. This was her last day. She had one—perhaps two—thousand steps left before this was all over. She had maybe 43.200 breaths left. Who knew how many words? And there were still so many things she wanted to experience.
A few hours later, long after they gave up on the cards and resorted to lying on the bed together, she piped up.
"Let me fuck you hard in the pouring rain," she insisted as she reached for his hand.
"When you told me you were fucking crazy, you weren't joking," he responded with a half-smile.
"You know I wasn't," she said with a smug smile.
"I like my girls insane."
His girls. She loved whenever he referred to her possessively. He was hers.
She wanted to be a little crazy. She was crazy, but this was something new and something she'd never done.
In the time they had gotten back to the motel, it had begun to monsoon outside. The small motel they were in had a desolate courtyard where there seemed to be nobody. Surely, nobody would be there. She dragged him over to a lounge chair beside the small pool in the motel. She pulled him over and began to kiss him.
She was right. This was thrilling. This felt different. She felt like this was something she had never, ever experienced before.
The thunder came a short while later and the two had to go inside. She watched as he turned the water on in the bathroom—they were both absolutely freezing from their tryst in the courtyard.
She looked over with a goofy smile on her face. She'd been so lost for so long and so blind…now she felt like she had achieved something. Now, she felt like her life was fulfilled; she had lived for something.
"Where are we going to next, baby?" he asked her as they lay in bed that night.
"Wherever you want to go," she insisted as she wrapped her fingers around his. Her fingers just intertwined perfectly with his.
He pressed his lips against the back of her neck. "How long do you want to stay on the road?"
She didn't move for a few moments. "However long it'll take us," she replied.
"For what?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. To find ourselves. To live our life. I want to finish my life on the road," she explained somewhat-morbidly. "We were born to die, Darling."
MilaMizz: It'll get better. I don't remember exactly...just try your best. I fall asleep writing all the time and then I curse at myself when I wake up at like 4 AM in front of the computer.
Tomorrow's one shot shall be All of Me by John Legend and it perhaps parallels with the song...twice? Yes, it's really, really loosely based on it. I don't know what happened. -Kayson