Feb 23rd, 2005, 10:25 PM
READ MY STORY
The clocks in this place pound out the minutes with massive thunks. They remind me of the time to go.
We have been ripping apart Robert Frost for 3 days now. With only 14 lines, the pickings are getting slim. My bulldog of a teacher keeps barking away. “But what is the connection between the darkness and death? And whiteness?” He is a squat little man, fingers like sausages. You wonder how he finds rings.
I can’t keep but thinking about how this is going to make me better. To have such a deep, almost sensual understanding of a thing. But yet I keep ripping and tearing away, the flesh was long ago stripped and now I am left sucking marrow from bone.
Then the realization, the flesh is tender and the marrow a delicacy, but ripping open a man’s chest won’t tell me why his heart beats. So with three thunks to go, I get up and leave.
“Where are you going?” the bark comes after me.
“Home” it was the only place that would make sense after this.
In my car now, I turn the radio way down. I can’t let this slip away. If I stop thinking about the carcass of Robert Frost, I will stop thinking all together. My destination is in my mind to. Home, with a pit stop at the place I am staying to get some funds.
In the road is a man, strolling across the street, paying no attention to me or the world. I stop for him, my first instinct is to yell but I don’t. There is something to be said about a man who doesn’t care about the massive hunk of steel on a collision course with him. I, after all, have a hundred times his mass and a thousand times his momentum. I could change his direction suddenly and violently. That is something that physicists refer to as acceleration, and it can be devastating. After all, isn’t that the only thing that ever kills anyone, change of direction?
My stop is ahead, getting out of my car I head straight for the door. From there to my room, there is somebody else in this house but I don’t care. I grab my money and am out the door before he even recognizes my presence.
I don’t have much in the way of cash, but it’s enough for the journey. Maybe even a good dinner along the way.
Now I really start moving or at least I feel like I am. The wonderful thing about going on the open road is that only one destination matters. In town you have to think about your destinations two or three in advance. Really most of the time you are backtracking any way. It’s a horrible way to live if you plan on getting anyplace.
The miles roll away under me, my odometer is the only thing that changes everything else, frozen in time. The scenery out side changes in abrupt spurts, first desert gives way to canyon, and then we have mountains.
Somewhere along the way, I pull in to get food. A nondescript place centered in a nondescript town. The people are the same sort of nondescript people you can always find in one of these places. And they are all hunched over their plates shoveling bite after bite into their mouths, food is all these kinds of people think about. Food and sex. I barley finish my meal, the portions are huge. But I need the energy for my journey so I gallantly fight each morsel. Shoving them down my throat against the better judgment of my stomach.
And then I peel the hell out of there. Good to be moving, sitting still was dangerous to do at this point any way. What was I thinking? If I am sitting still then it all has a chance to catch up to me, something that cannot happen until I am safely at my destination.
This is the final stretch. The part that always seems the longest. When you are in a car alone for 4 hours at a time you get really good at thinking. You think about everything, and by that I mean anything. Stuff that in your normal life you would never even consider thinking about now occupy you bored mind. The chief thing on my mind was how heavy my eyes felt.
Riding high on self awareness it is easy to forget about your body and mine was tired. I knew from the signs that I only had 6 more miles to go. 5, 4 and by 3 I am asleep. My rest only lasts a few seconds because it came just a moment before a curve in the road, and the sheer violence of twisting metal and crushing glass is enough to make anybody wake.
And man it was a bad awakening. My car spins wildly as I clutch at the steering wheel, no use. And spinning still, I fly through the guardrail (it tears away like tin foil) and over the edge. 50 feet later I am upside down with my steering wheel pinning me against my seat. I am sure that all my ribs are crushed. I think about fighting but it is pointless. I lay back and prepare to give in to the cold.
Well fuck. I should have seen this one coming, you should have seen this one coming. After all nothing lost is ever found, and if anything is ever found it must be lost.
Crits plz
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