By Anjali Krishna

Life is waiting for weekends, you’d told your little sister once. So on these Austin weekends, there’s nothing to do other than everything.

It’s 1:43 a.m. in Austin and you’ve borrowed your girlfriend's new Miata. It’s red and you’re drunk and you love her. But somehow — you asked her for her keys to pick up a friend and she handed them over — you’re not sure. She laughed the way she would when she was drunk — full-bodied, head tilted up with joy. You steadied her softly before she fell over herself.

You’re better off than I am, take them, she said.

A twinge of guilt had shot through your stomach at her all-consuming trust in you. You kissed her on the lips and grabbed the keys dangling from her hand to get away from that ache in your body, from her undeniable faith in your capabilities.

I’ll be back in thirty, you said.

So now you’re going 60 mph through West Campus and you couldn’t imagine a cop pulling you over or someone twisting into your lane at just the wrong time. Drake is on — “You Broke My Heart” — and the top is down. You’re thinking as much as you’re feeling the alcohol in your blood, and that line you did earlier is hitting as hard as the wind smacking your face. It feels like a caress, all of it, from the bass thumping in your seat to the stop sign waiting ten feet in front of you.

You blow past it. You couldn’t have stopped if you tried.

It’s a beautiful October night in Austin. The weather, hot with a licking breeze, had spurred your impromptu weekend trip from the polite quietness of College Station. You tell yourself that enough nights out in Austin, however, can unstick you from the trap of a slow life.

Sitting back into the driver’s seat, you catch traces of your girlfriend’s jasmine perfume, heady like a fogged-up bathroom mirror. In just these moments you’ve been apart, you miss her. You aren’t sure if you’re allowed to miss her, though, driving her car although you know you shouldn’t be, running from your past and inevitable future. As much as you love her, you don’t know how to be in love. You don’t know how to let her depend on you. You only know you wouldn’t want to be without her.

You catch a glimpse of yourself in the rearview mirror — eyes half-shut, hair blown back to reveal your forehead — and it makes you want to throw up. Hands are on the wheel, you’re veering inches into the left lane. In the mirror, you see another car approaching and quickly straighten out. With your eyes newly focused on the road, your antsy fingers shake with restlessness.

You’re drunk, but you still think you can drive.

Gearing up to turn at the red, your eyes catch on the tennis courts to your left. Your gaze lingers a few seconds too long. In your sudden daze, your foot suddenly slips off the brakes and the car jumps forward. You stop yourself jerkily and try to think about anything other than tennis.

Yash gave you a look when you took the keys. You’d talked to him, your best friend of four years, just two weeks ago about your relationship for the first time.

I know I love her, I think. But it’s just work. How can I love something that’s work? Drunk, he nodded along.

If you love her, that's what matters. Make it work.

He carelessly used that confession, threw that delicate moment of substance-shrouded insecurity against you during some banal roommate argument. You don’t know why, but you’d thrown back much worse: telling him he wouldn’t get into medical school, that his youthful naivete belied eventual failure. Immediately, you regretted it. You knew who you sounded like when you yelled.

You glance again at the courts, trying to push tennis, your casual cruelty with Yash, and your waiting girlfriend from your mind.

Think of anything else, otherwise you’re lost in the memory you’ve been trying to forget —

You find yourself burning up, feverish, cooking in the Texas heat radiating from the hardcourt underfoot. You wonder whether you’ll come out of the oven a fully formed man in Galveston, Wichita Falls, or whatever rural corner of Texas this amateur tennis career takes you to.

You know you’re better than your competitor on the other side of the court, but you’ve already given away the last three points. You backhand down the line after his serve, moving back to anticipate the next move. His arm extends just enough to pop the ball over the net and this is an easy shot, a winner — but you slap it out of bounds.

Your dad’s eyes burn holes into you through the chain-link fence.

You recounted the story to a friend a few years later, about when your dad hit you — the first and only time he laid hands on you. You couldn’t recall the exact words in Telugu, but you remember your cheek aflame and the gist of what he called you:

Underconfident.

He always knew best how to make it hurt, to pinpoint your failure. You never could figure out how to make that helpful in a match. That particular skill only came to you years after you’d quit tennis, about a year after your dad died.

In that argument with Yash, you saw your father in yourself for the first time — identifying chinks in his armor and finding just where to land the kill shot. In the cooling ashes of your anger, you hear the insults you destroyed your best friend’s heart with. You hear that they were spoken in your father’s voice.

Fingers tapping at the wheel to a frantic beat, you can’t wait any longer for the light to turn green. You put your foot on the gas and go, letting wind from the open roof cool the sweat at the nape of your neck. The breeze blows away the scent of her perfume.

You wonder how many hearts you’ll break — of those you love and those who love you back — before you self-destruct. So here you are, watching yourself become that which made you, taunting fate to put you out of your misery. You can’t stop yourself from inevitable self-destruction any more than you can slow down the car before you go —

Off a speed-bump, flying just one second like plane turbulence, like sunsets from the house in India, like kissing her on the lips for the first time.

Does anything get better than this? Of course it does. There are drugs, but then there is love but then there is you.

The car hits the ground again and you miss it. You want to do it again — to fly. That’s all that has worked for you. You can’t imagine living when this isn’t your priority, when you don’t trudge through the week until Thursday night so it can all go up in the air again. Life is waiting for weekends, you’d told your little sister once. So on these weekends, there’s nothing to do other than everything.

You think you’re in control until you’re not. You think you’re not spinning out until you are. As much as you’re in control at this moment, of this car, there doesn’t seem to be a chance you could actually shape the trajectory of your life.

You love your girlfriend but you’re driving her car and there’s a red light in front of you. You can’t stop yourself from pushing your foot down all the way on the gas and going.

Before the crash, your mind flips between what was and what could have been, more and more rapidly until neither is nothing, until something is nothing.

But that night in Austin, you parked the car — parallel — and tucked the keys into your girlfriend’s back pocket.

How was the drive? she asked.

You blinked at the banality of her question, wrapping your arms around her waist as you came down from the adrenaline rush.

I’m glad we came this weekend. I needed to escape.

—

Five years after you escape the crash, you drive through a barely-there town called Sophia, Montana. Here, they pay enough money for you to exert minimal effort into your tedious office job.

In the end, life doesn’t take you to Austin or New York City, as you’d wished. It entraps you in another dead-end like College Station, where you exchange country charm for icy mountaintops.

Even here, where the phone service fails everywhere and the sun sets at 4 p.m., your fate haunts you. Even after you’ve chased your girlfriend away, fate chases you.

This time, you’re not speeding.

This time, you’re sober.

Fate finds you behind the wheel once again.

It’s in Sophia, Montana that you’re sober and you total the car. ■