Ode to car rides home

I stick my head out of the window, ignoring the precarious sensation, or rather, premonition, that I might be beheaded by a moving bus or car. I observe how the dark of the night coalesces imperceptibly yet perfectly with the heady condition of my brain. Dozens of beer bottles among friends, the raucous laughter of rambling conversation that perhaps no one will remember, the heat akin to a funeral pyre burning in the intestines: it can make one's head swim. The alcohol rises up in my system, waiting for the ultimate moment to declare its presence. Osmosis, soon.

I shout at the empty streets, the blurring city lights (turning to orange boomerangs during sharp turns,) the fresh pre-dawn wind on my face. I shout for all that I have within me, and its harmony with what was without me. Speed, Love, Lust, Loss, Emptiness,Thrill; all that was within and without. I am giddy, drunk, angry! And so I shout! My heart, indefatigable, my voice, strong and ringing. I hear my friends laughing beside me, hair in our faces, smoke on our hair, breathing smoke, laughing fire. It is a fast drive home to the promise of warm and comfortable beds that we won't even have the luxury of time (and sobriety) to feel, and to that one last hit as crowning glory to the night that, yet again, we were successful at filling up our livers and our minds with our empty, ceaseless, and beautiful existences.

This is an ode to my youth, to car rides home, to a night's memory swilled in beer, to friends defending every silver lining. I want to burn the emotion of inebriated car rides home into my head, permanently. It just feels too sad to think about what happened before and after that glorious memory; my heart can't stray to those feelings and images just yet. Because the moment that I begin to let go of that Saturday night, shouting at the stars in revelry, everything will be in a maddening rush to start asserting the rationality of what's been happening around me, all the how's and the why's... and I, at that point, would start to feel. So what is so horrible about that? Sometimes, just the moment of remembrance can crush you enough. Maybe, just maybe, it's not bad to admit that at this place and time in my life, I prefer the pyres in my intestines, the holes in my lungs, the noise in my ears, the hustle of ambition. And for all the messed-up things in this world, preferring those things rather than the truth is what's horrible.

"Can I delay it any longer?" a voice inside the cavernous emptiness inside me asks. Because actually, honestly...what this really is is an ode to being young, beautiful, and terrified, (terrified!) beyond my wits. Beyond what I feel like are the only handful of things that I truly hold for myself. Beneath the freedom is fear, beneath fear is pain, and above everything else, overarching all that I thought I knew, there is only that big question mark looming and lurking around. This isn't cynicism talking. It's just me.

This is an ode to car rides home...and to escaping and delaying every bit of reality that I can. Just for a little while more.

It feels like a deluge

 "Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of water. And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart."

I don't see how it could hurt like this. I didn't want it to, but man, it really hurts. Did it have to be this way? I knew that it was going nowhere good, or going nowhere, period. But I never figured that he would end things like that. I don't want to be vulnerable, I never have.  But this time I feel like I can tell the whole world just how much I'm hurting...but it won't matter at all. It won't change things, not a single bit. I've been judged for this relationship already anyway, been told how I'm in way over my head, been whispered about... What's the point of keeping to myself just how much my ego is bruised? And how my heart is flattened like a pancake, drowned in syrup and eaten by his unforgiving appetite, to be digested by his emotional entrails and finally rendered as nothing more than just a piece of unremarkable, brown shit?

Unremarkable, brown shit.

It hurts that much.