These days I feel as if I am disintegrating. I drink or I smoke and afterwards it’s like there’s a big hole inside me. I can’t fill it with anything.
There are moments when I am driving my car and I wonder, Am I dying, and I reach under my shirt and touch my stomach and when I pull my hand back I almost expect to see blood on my fingers. A secret wound: a knife slid under my ribs, unfelt at the time; or an arrow that had been protruding from my stomach all along. It would explain so much. But there is no blood.
What it would it be like to drive the car straight off the road, into a guardrail or another car or off the edge of a cliff? It’s easy to romanticize that image, but when I slow it down and imagine the trauma my body would suffer, my bones snapping and shattering, my insides turning to jelly and squirting from me, I am filled with indescribable revulsion. I know that I’m going to keep driving, that eventually I will get home, that I will put my things away and change clothes and sit in my chair, and that I will then have to do something with myself. All roads lead to the end.
I’m glad I am moving to a new city.
