The Runners

I wake in the familiar haze of hangover. I have been back in D.C. for less than two months. In two more months I am moving to South Korea. And two weeks from today I am leaving D.C. to head to Charlotte. I let the next two years flicker through my head, a series of still frames in which I am always alone. I roll over sleepy in his silent bed. He is an old friend. We have been fucking since I got back from New Zealand. It is new and fun and perfect. We are both leaving. It is always only sex and we know this. He tells me about all the horrible things he does to his girlfriends. We laugh. I am attracted to him. I am fucked up. I slide my panties back on realizing he is going to break his promise to fuck me again in the morning. I didn’t get to come. He is late for work. We sit in strange silence on the way to the metro, everything still, we are paused, suspended. The same stoned silence the night before. Something feels different. What is different? Why is he being so strange? He didn’t touch me the same way, I know it. I am crazy. Everything is fine. I am positive he doesn’t want me anymore. Or maybe it is the other way around. My eyelids drop and flutter with the hum of the beat-up van and the breeze swings warm and soft on my face. Something has changed. I can feel it in every piece of me. I am often wrong.

“I have a strange feeling that was the last time I’m ever going to fuck you.” I shatter into the silence. Only silence follows.

We arrive at the metro and he kisses me on the cheek chiming, “Have a nice day, honey!” some sick twist on the domestication our once weekly sex sessions so flippantly mock. We were always friends. We are only friends. “Have a good day at work, dear” is my usual response. Today I mutter “see ya” and hop out of the van. What is wrong with me? I do not look back.

I push headphones immediately into my ears and let the weight of whatever it is push me deep into the ground. Was he really the one being so strange? For over a year this is all I have known. An endless string of boys who I leave or who leave me. Always running, keep moving, don’t get stuck, don’t let them get you cause you know you have to go. Two weeks here, six more in Charlotte, one in Denver with the boy I know I could fall in love with. Maybe. I think I could. But I won’t. He thinks I am perfect. He is wrong. I won’t let him find out. Gone again. What happened to the girl that threw herself on the tracks at every chance, begging for a train wreck? Since when do I push them all away? Now cautious, cold, and calculating. I say cruel things to remind him I don’t really care. Our affections are only for the sex, for the show we are putting on. I like kissing him. We do not care. He will never get to me, no one can catch a girl running so fast. But he is perfect because he will not try. He’s a runner too. We laugh broad and free at how little we care. We are invincible. It is perfect. No strings, no emotion, fuck whoever you want, play house when you like and never call. I want him to call. It is just sex. It is all I want.

But now I am sinking stones. The ground breathes and heaves beneath me. It is swallowing me whole. I let the maudlin strums of Nico Stai drown me. I am enveloped. I am invisible. I am suddenly made of sorrow.

He is not the only one I will throw away. Not the first, not the last. Another name, another month, another dick, another run. Another year of garbage to collect, of hearts to discard, of self-inflicted wounds. I will tell him when I fuck other men so he knows he is not the only one. He tells me when he fucks another woman and I don’t care. Fuck her the same day you fuck me. Give her the tights I leave on your floor by mistake. I do not care. I remind him what we are. I remind me what we are. He is not the one that needs it. I can’t get stuck, can’t let anyone change my plans. Not this girl, I am stronger than that, I am independent, I am utterly alone. I will tell myself this is what I want. I will travel the world. I will meet boys and kiss them and fuck them and love them and leave them and hate them for leaving me. I will run until my bones are dust, until I am the only one left alone. Because that is the only thing I know how to do anymore. Leave.

 

Twelve Months, Untitled

Last October I thought I fell in love with a poet. Pieces of our costumes lying scattered as words across an ever messy bedroom floor he spoke to me artful and quiet and breathed me in nanometers. Though I couldn’t have known it then, it was the last night it might have all been true.

I spent the month of November pretending it was.

December brought the one I broke. My saccharin pawn, unwitting elastic, I let him play a part I didn’t know and kiss the scars he couldn’t see. He did everything he could, except the one thing he couldn’t.

January stumbled over a jazz saxophonist in San Francisco. The awkwardness arrived before the dawn and didn’t have the decency to leave as I did when the sun breached the stranger’s bed. I ran for a taxi forgetting his name with the cliché on the nightstand, holding only to hope that he wouldn’t remember mine.

February was the best friend of December who so wrongly had me rapt. Despite whatever could never have been the staining raze of its inescapable impossibility had me longing for the graceless unknown of that shy San Franciscan saxophonist…what was his name again?

March took me to New Zealand and the original domino of an Irishman. But again I missed, kissed the wrong friend first, and found myself swimming surreptitious in disaster, impossible as it is for a girl with no self-control to exercise something she doesn’t have. Despite slight glints of his wavering willpower, ultimately we were a stalemate: an immovable object against an unstoppable force.

April gave me the first tense tease of satisfaction: a painfully sweet Scot who made it the way I remembered. But with just a few fleeting moments of that long elusive comfort his ticket took him home. When he left for Glasgow, I left for Wellington, and the promises we made lay stuffed at the bottom of our backpacks.

In May I met the Irishman who stayed. Handsome like a lonely streetlight, he and I wandered the same alleys. But when it came to the thing that everyone’s after, it consumed and escaped me in inexplicable flashes. Too scared to break another, I left. But made a promise to come back that I still intend to keep.

In June it was a Scotsman in Malaysia. Though lacking the syrupy brogue that paints itself round every word and buckled my knees back in April, he was effortless as a day in bed. But as camaraderie began its inch around the corner, he had his ticket home as well. His last three days on the island were the only three days it could never be more, and so the universe continued its creative torture on my wearily addicted limbs.

July held the worst of Asia and of the Irish. Fucking me the wrong way, he saw the taut, shadowed cells of schleroderma that have rested between my shoulder blades since I was six. His mouth a rictus of fear at this memory of a burn or a childhood scar I barely recall, he lost it. As I was forced to assure the horror of a boy I hadn’t “given it to him,” he walked out of the room to my shamed stone glare and I twisted my skin and bones back to the door in used, unadmittable, regret.

August brought me to Vietnam and found an Irishman who enveloped me sudden as a syringe with possibility. But sunrise rooftop sex is far more romantic in notion or ideal than after six hours of whiskey buckets. When he left in the morning, he kissed me as if to tell me it was only one night because it had to be, and I sighed like a sinking brick with the trying futility of it all.

In September I made my way to Laos and found a group of friends I liked too much to leave. In the eleventh month of the curse of wasted fucks, forgettable boys, and half-loves gone awry, I finally didn’t kiss the boy I wanted, the one I knew I shouldn’t. Thinking, knowing, there must be a purpose to eleven dead ends. Watching the fastest heaving through the ribbon I realized this isn’t a race I’m meant to run right now.

Yet as the leaves are again turning tawny reds back home, I find myself keeping a promise to a streetlight, lonely as we are together. And while the buds are greening above our grins, beneath our hemisphere, I suddenly see the nature of such seasons, and know, at least for now, that I can only cross this bridge as it’s crumbling beneath me.

 

don’t think twice, it’s alright

eight thousand
six hundred
and seven
thoughts crossed a lost
wanderer
sauntering soul, slow
eyes high, shoulders low
Who was the last to know?

He comes, he comes
He goes, he goes

she burned off her hair
chopped her ribbons and bows
turned in her shoes
for dirty bare knuckled toes

she showed him the future
of sticky fire-tarred roads, tolling
soles scalding
suitcase in hand on a highway of ash

gave him the last
of the baggage they’d packed

and with the crooked division
of a traveler’s math
sliced the half-sharpened smile

said she’s not coming back

 

goodbye’s too good a word, babe/so i’ll just say fare thee well

The last month of excited and nervous anticipation had finally come to its climax. Next to the door of Iva’s cozy Venice Beach apartment sat an overstuffed backpacker’s pack, a similarly overstuffed messenger bag, and a pair of Rainbow flip-flops, worn and dirtied with their travels thus far and ready to take my feet on their next adventure. As the minutes passed I rushed hurriedly to make sure there was nothing I had forgotten and it felt as though I was perched on a stove top, each following second bringing my blood closer to boil. By the time I tossed my bags in the trunk of her long, black boat of a slowly deteriorating Benz, I was electric. Every limb charged with an unfamiliar vibration, or rather, a stronger dose of a feeling felt before. As we sailed easy down the city streets with laughter on my breath and wonder in my eyes, I gazed contemplatively out the window as the reliable row of palms whipped past. Los Angeles to me was a heartless, grimy city that had always left a bitter distaste on my tongue. I recalled that last Thursday as Iva and I made our way downtown and I sat absorbing the city as it passed. It was the only romance I ever saw in the maudlin palms; silhouetting themselves against the ashtray gray of that smoggy Hollywood night in their sad, terrible postures. But this night was different. For the first time I saw their lithe graceful forms preen against the crisp illuminated darkness through which I would soon be flying. Or perhaps I was just feeling unusually sentimental for the sleaze and whore, the heartbreak and romance, of my last American city. This was the last, lonely thought of my country to make it through my mind. As Iva pulled up to the Air Pacific entrance of the international terminal at LAX, we got out of the car to say our last goodbyes for the year to come. With the heavy pack weighing on my petite stature, we embraced each other tightly and offered best wishes in both directions, knowing that our friendship was forever unbound by time or distance.

I made it to the gate without event and reached out one last time to those I love the most before boarding the massive double-decker jet. One shitty meal, two cocktails, and two Ambien later I spread myself across the entire row I had been provided on the sparsely sold flight. As the plane made its eleven hour journey through the blind black of the midnight Pacific, I slept, knowing when I woke that the constant buzzing of curious anticipation would finally be satiated by the start of the life I had been waiting to lead.

 

One Foot Out…

I am sitting in seat 18F on Virgin America flight ninety-seven, non-stop from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles International. In four days I will be on Air Pacific flight eight-eleven non-stop service to Nadi, Fiji. And on the twenty-fifth of February I will be on Air Pacific flight four-thirteen non-stop to Auckland. Three one way tickets will take me from the truest home I have ever known to a place I have never been, and where I know not a single soul, for the next year. A month ago this was all just a tempting joke, a crazy idea, a reckless dream, and now my plane is taking off. I press my head to the cool plastic of the window, refreshing against my skin in the stifling cabin, and watch D.C. miniaturize before my eyes. As eighteen-wheelers turn to ants, the white remnants of the third blizzard in this historic winter swallow the last detail of the landscape. Soon only the winding black veins of pavement, cutting through the mounds of dirty snow in mountainous piles around the city, are visible. As we ascend, the gritty city dirty fades away, and as the snow suddenly appears as pure as the moment it fell, I whisper farewell to Washington.

There is a strange feeling slithering around me, squeezing my limbs slow and strong as a snake, as I hold one foot over the edge, eyes wide open, more than ready to follow with the next. It is excitement that electrifies my skin, tinged with nervous curiosity that tightens my belly, and pangs bittersweet when I think of the ones I love and left behind. It is a feeling that I have never felt before and though people tell me i should be scared shitless, and making a plan, or predicting the future, I am not. I want to not know what is going to happen. I want to stumble from one place to the next as the universe guides me blindly through strangers and coincidence. I want to be ready for anything and open to everything and say no to nothing and find that something that feeds my wandering soul, that has kept my roots from searching the same soil for too long. And no part of me doubts that I will.

As I wake from a painfully uncomfortable excuse for a nap, my eyes burn with the need for real sleep, fighting my racing mind and famished body. Raising the window shade, bright white pierces my heavy eyes and I realize I slept through the long, eventless stretch of fly-over states. The Rocky Mountains rise jagged like scars on the vast body of America, and pure, powdery white tops the ridges and valleys past the hazy edge of the expansive horizon. As I gaze down on the formidable landscape, I wonder how the birds see New Zealand, with which strangers I will find love, and what kind of girl I will have grown into when I find myself wandering back to the family of people I love in the District. The best part is not knowing.

…

As the plane touched down in the soft crepuscular light over the Hollywood Hills, I twisted my aching body against the seat, and reestablished communication with the outside world after five long hours of clear skies and red eyes (say word). As my luck of late would have it, my inbox held a fortuitous inquiry: a strong travel writer available from March through April needed to come to South Africa, all expenses paid, to assist in finishing a travel guide in time for the World Cup. Amazing. With the thrill of possibility already rising in my chest, I read on. The ideal individual is able to eat out three times a day and go out to bars on weekends, is comfortable with living in hostels on a budget, is flexible and has a sense of humor, and has experience traveling, preferably within Africa. Unbelievable. It was like reading a synopsis of my life, a description of the very dream I had been chasing. It felt as though the moment I let go of certainty and control, the universe opened up to me.

Everything was aligning effortlessly and those bittersweet pangs that haunted my contemplative mind on the plane were quickly overwhelmed by the sweet, addictive high that comes with a new unknown adventure and boundless possibility. If they could fly me round trip to Africa from New Zealand I could be back in New Zealand by April with nine months before my visa expires. It’s perfect. Still just a hope, an opportunity, I wait to learn upon where I stumble next. Perhaps in two weeks I will cross the South Pacific only to continue on over the Indian as well, and find myself in the cradle of humanity once again, exactly one year from the first time I journeyed there. And if the winds don’t blow me toward South Africa, then I’ll take my wandering soul to the Northland and learn how to surf in the last sweet weeks of Kiwi summer.

 

Flirtations in Haiku

haikus are easy
but sometimes they don’t make sense
refrigerator.

You are correct there.
Plus they have to mean something
This one is just form

nothing has meaning
but the snow is too lovely
to think otherwise

even robots think
bourbon is so delicious
11001

I think I like you
but happiness is fleeting
it all goes to shit

our meaninglessness
says suicide or love are
our only options

Always those options
the same as for everyone
they live between them.

how long do you think
we can keep on conversing
solely in haiku?

as long as it takes
structure is irrelevant
talk is always talk

those who understand
are better at the bullshit
think i like you too

why bullshit when you
know the truth? though honesty
is often useless

I think honesty
is the most important thing
existing between

Honesty to self?
Or honestly to others?
Or else just to life?

be honest with me
i will be honest with me too
it’s the only way

Is honesty just
never lying? or is it
complete openness

personally i
believe in being open
as much as you can

For someone open
you seem too mysterious
tell me about you

I’m a crazy girl
capricious and impulsive
I do what I want

Could be dangerous
living just in the moment
you could hurt someone

Yes, I have before
but have been burned myself too
cycles are endless

Sometimes a cycle
in reality’s a spiral
and should be broken.

i continue hope
that one day it will break and
i will be content

you ask me questions
but i know nothing of you
and am curious

I’m an open book
if it’s not in my profile
feel free to ask me

what is it that you
want to get the most from life,
you can’t do without?

A cliched answer.
All I want is happiness
trouble is what kind.

i laugh syllables
don’t we all want happiness
but what makes you smile?

Gaining new knowledge
and turtles, and knowing that
I am not alone

mmm….i love turtles
but giraffes are my fav’rite
we are not alone.

Giraffes look awkward.
Physically we are not.
Other ways, maybe.

awkward is ok
in any way, shape, or form
we are all crazy.

Perhaps you are right.
that does not mean we are all
crazy together

i am not quite sure
what you mean when you say that
please tell me more, dear.

In my adventures
craziness can isolate
is what I have found

There is not that much
closeness or camaraderie
in any nut house

haha very true
i think i am drunk. time to
smoke a cigarette

Think I am jealous.
Cigarettes and alcohol:
keys to happiness

i love every vice
that i cling to so dearly
should i be worried?

Only when sober
Which is not a state that I
ever recommend.

The golden rule’s weak.
Hedonism always wins
happy life beats good

if you cant be good
be bad, really fucking bad
time to make coffee.

 

Lately it’s been coming in rhymes…

while my voice tempts you now
with intrigue and grace
and honesty pours from
the look on my face
i am scared for the day
that it turns to distaste
for i’m a disgrace
disguised as a woman
who capriciously cuts men
and leaves them in ruins
but among the poor souls who lay dead in the streets
i don’t want to see your face at my feet
so make your retreat and i won’t repeat
the history that i just can’t seem to beat
the mystery of why i’m still incomplete

love to me used to be honest and pure
but lately it feels like i’m casting a lure
unsure of the tryst i’m fishing for
and i’m wishing for peace
as my battered heart beats
tattered and weak as he walks out the door

we’ve been shattered to pieces
by our previous thesis
but love isn’t something to reach us through teachers
it’s something we learn from the scars on our backs
taking our turns to be whipped and react
we are curious creatures
who run from our pasts
chasing shadows of gestures
we know couldn’t last
now damaged and running
we’ll use the last of our cunning
for a moment, a chance
that couldn’t be passed

I talk to you now with one foot out the door
as I cower and scour trying to settle the score
and devour I might every fool in sight
who strikes and ignites
but then falls to the floor
to the pile of ashes
of those smoked before
but I grasp this last match
with the tips of my fingers
and it burns as the flame
it flickers but lingers
it singes my skin
but still we begin
this cycling history
we know we won’t win.

 

The Unraveling

It was late October and I awoke at noon in the bed of a bartender with whom I had been flirting as some sort of idle pastime, but who, once our lips struggled through an awkward and passionless kiss, fell from the queue and vanished, like snowflakes melting into a city street. I passed out next to him just before sunrise in all of my clothes and when I woke to the piercing midday sun breaking through the curtainless windows, I immediately realized I was five hours late for work. While showing up late for the corporate job I loathed so vehemently wasn’t an anomalous occurrence, five hours was egregious, and not sending an email with a bullshit appointment or family emergency before going back to sleep was unprecedented. It was Wednesday and on that Thursday I was to fly to DC for the weekend to see my friends and the one boy who had my attentions rapt of late. Despite the fact that we had only been talking across four hundred miles for a few weeks, even the lightly playful flirtations with that British bartender and his horrid teeth left a small tinge of guilt in my mouth and gut for this boy. But things with him had only just begun and the witty bartender easily dissolved into anticipation for my trip to see the DC poet. Groggily walking to my car in last night’s outfit through the unseasonably warm sun I felt a slow panic rising in my chest. Were they going to fire me for this? I couldn’t very well roll in at two p.m. on Wednesday with no excuse then take off Thursday and Friday as well. Clearly the only option was to make up a family emergency, change my plane ticket, and fly out a day early. My addiction to reckless spontaneity was instantly piqued at this thought and I began to grind the wheels of my next harebrained scheme through my infinitely careless mind.

Opening the door to my apartment I called the only person I could ever call for advice on wildly irresponsible decision making: Keats. The only friend of mine that can truly empathize with the inability to make decisions like a responsible adult, Keats has always been there to help me come up with an excuse to needlessly miss two days of work and waste a couple hundred bucks for a few extra hours someplace with nary a judgmental comment. This day was no different and Keats successfully coached me through two hours of planning, packing, and pacing until I made my way to the airport with a half-burnt plan and a credit card waiting to be charred.

Sifting through the crowds at the airport excited anticipation whirred in me like music; my limbs bouncing almost imperceptibly as I nervously planned my attempt to get the ticket change fee waived. A large busty blonde woman with a scowl carved into her hard, textured face groaned for the next person in line to step forward and I allowed the gentleman behind me to go ahead. I made my way down the counter to a light-skinned black man who looked like a friendly bus driver from a seventies sitcom. I cheerfully greeted and chatted with the amicable Earl as his fingers busily typed away and he listed my options to get to DC that day. Despite my sweetest efforts and sincerest pleas, the change would cost two-hundred and twenty-five dollars and I would be on standby for each of the four flights leaving the rest of the day. Considering that reckless spontaneity was the name of this game I handed him my exhausted credit card and made my way to the security checkpoint. After spending eight hours on standby at two different bars for three different flights in an airport fifteen minutes from my house I finally made it on the last flight available and was air-bound to DC at eleven that night. The flight was a dream-like blink for my boozed-up body and finally seeing Keats’ face through the darkened window of her boyfriend’s Audi pulled a smile across my face, dry and tired with travel. I didn’t yet know it, but the events of this weekend would seal a fate I had long awaited, and another I secretly feared.

The excitement of my arrival rinsed the exhaustion from my body almost immediately as Keats and I made our way from BWI to Columbia Heights to meet Faye and the poet. As we walked up to the bar in the chilly October night, I saw him standing there smoking a cigarette in his lanky graces and I rushed to throw myself around him and kiss him as I promised him I would. His shy steel eyes illuminated as he saw the face that had been missing for weeks and he kissed me hard and soft again with a furtive smile curling up towards those cloudy eyes. From this moment on, the weekend was a blur of blissful sloppiness. We spent the large majority of our time together, getting drunk each night and awakening lazy with skin against skin as the sun poured morning in his bed each day. The whirlwind of parties, boozing, and staying under covers through the late afternoon took us through the days too quickly and by the time Sunday rolled around I already began to feel the familiar sinking in my chest that I would again have to leave this life to which I knew I belonged and return to the life that every piece of me was fighting.

This weekend was a little different than most as my return flight to Charlotte was to leave at five a.m. on Monday morning from Baltimore from which I was to go home, shower, and go directly to work. A part of me knew I would never make it to work that Monday morning when I booked the ticket, but as I have about as much sensibility as I have self-control, I took my chances. As the raucous Sunday night at the bar twisted its way back to his house we tipped up bottles of bourbon to our swooning faces with surreptitious glances and playful laughter. And as that night wore into early morning and the hour I needed to be en route to the airport approached, the poet and I lay in that same bed of his and I whispered to him that I didn’t want to go. And then it happened: the ever irresponsible Keats called me and told me she didn’t have her car and that she would have to take a cab to pick up the car before she could drive me. We would never make it. It was all I needed and in that moment my mind was made up. Even though not ten minutes later one of the poet’s closest friends offered me a randomly rare three a.m. ride to Baltimore there was no turning back in me and I curled up closer to him, pressing my body to his, and stated in defiant surrender that I wouldn’t be going anywhere. A look of panic flashed through his eyes like a confession but in moments his arms were wrapped around me and his chorus of snores told me he was sleeping like stones. I laid there with eyes open as panic began to boil inside of me, shallowing each breath. I could have possibly just made the most irresponsible decision of my life. Halfway through the semester of writing classes and weeks before I was supposed to apply to grad schools I was throwing away my finance career with no job and no money and no plans and seventy-five grand in debt. Only the knowledge that the life I was leading in Charlotte was slowly suffocating me kept me together that night. I had wanted to get the fuck out of where I was before it swallowed and changed me for so long and now, after everything, something in this poet finally gave me the courage to do so. I needed to do this, it had to happen and there could be no point in fighting it any longer. Settling into the decision I made, I lay back down and slithered carefully into his arms, silently thanking him for the strength that he didn’t know he had given me.

The next morning I did not bother to send an email attempting to save my career. The decision had already been made and it settled firmer and more comfortably within me with each passing minute like a fast friend. The poet and I spent another morning quietly lazy in a bed scattered with kisses and as he got up to shower and run errands before work I stayed naked, wrapped in his blankets, and let the weight of my eyelids lead me back to a contented slumber. Upon awakening I bought a ticket on the six p.m. Amtrak back to Charlotte comfortably wrapped in the knowledge that I was driving back up the following weekend for Halloween and possibly never finding my way back to the place in which the last four dead years lived again. That Tuesday, upon returning to work I put in my notice. I threw away half my shit, packed everything I could into my Jeep, and by the 10th of November, Charlotte was just a city to remain in my rearview mirror.

 

Where the fuck am I?

At midnight I took a shot of Jager and the hot burning in my belly gave rise to unintentional desires.“I think I have to leave tonight.” I told Andy, and he frowned at my dreary eyes. “But I’m going to need some blow.” The hippie bartender that smelled like grass and told me he loved me would know where to get some, I thought, and he did. I told Andy it was time to go home and pack and he frowned against my newly brightened glance. Three hours passed in our tiny apartment and my life sat in piles by the door. Andy carried me piece by piece into the back of that beat up Jeep until we both knew it was time for me to leave. At three-thirty in the morning I jammed the oversized screwdriver into my lack of an ignition and left Charlotte behind to the crisp dark.

Tired and fighting I inhaled the only thing keeping me awake as I sliced the air in front of me for a hundred miles. The weight of my eyes was beginning to win the war against the last bitter bump and I reached blindly into the cup holder in an attempt to regain consciousness. Pulling the tiny bag towards me and into the lights of the highway, I saw it was empty. Fuck me fumbling to turn on the interior light I looked down and saw the crude powder littered in the ashtray and knew that finding any of it would be searching for snowflakes in a puddle. Five hours left to drive and I ran a finger along the edges of the console, hoping for even a memory of alertness. It was going to be a long drive.

Bickering with the night for another hour it was time to get a cup of coffee. The streets made no sense to me that night as sign after unfamiliar sign whipped in the distance in long green trails behind me. Where the fuck am I – I clumsily struggled to check the GPS, to reassure myself I was on eighty-five, on a highway I had driven one hundred and twelve times, and driven to him three. Two hundred miles now and I swore I should have been there in the tenth hour of this six hour drive. Towns that never existed before lay like the dead one after another on the deserted highway and shitty truckstop coffee was no substitute for sanity.

The road blurred in front of me in long stretches of nothing and time stood still as I traveled with my eyes closed. The sun never rose that morning as black yawned into greys and sharp dashboard greens wavered against the coming light. As the sky illuminated my sallow face the city of Richmond lay dormant on the left side of the highway and though I knew I was on the right road, I still couldn’t recognize a thing. I stopped again desperate with sleep and puckered my mouth, dry and sticky with bitter coffee and too many cigarettes, but my bendered body surrendered without choice as a hundred miles taunted me to leave it all ahead.

As I slapped my face to stay awake I saw the first signs pulling on my memory, taking me to him, and I knew I was going to make it after all. Fourteenth street was longer than ever as I crawled my way towards Columbia Heights and I found myself turning down Park as the time trickled past nine-thirty. I parked my car illegally, leaving my life in the back, and taking only my laptop up to the porch, littered familiar with empty beer cans and cigarettes smoked straight to the filter. This is his house. I found the long and slender man stretched oblivious in the basement and curled my way under his arms, the third time I would take him by surprise. With half my life in my car and the other half in his basement, I finally made it home.