Flash Friday

The sun rose high and bright over the flats this morning. I wish I could say I lived in a valley, or on a mountainside somewhere high above grasslands or country, but I don’t. The land here is as flat and barren as a rolled out carpet. A few bumps along the way where it rolled over a prone cat, or a piece of trash that missed the garbage can on the floor. It has that new carpet smell too, the smell of sand mixed with salt mixed with factory pollution mixed with the forever tinge of excitement in the distance. This is where most people come to escape from reality. And this is where my reality lives. I had all the windows down in my car, and resisted the urge to stick my head out the window like a drooling canine as I drove, feeling the rushing air whip through my shower-damp hair on the interstate, knowing that today I would taste an early freedom, knowing that although it felt like any other day of the week, it was Friday and the call of the wild ran strong. The pressure of an endless list of things to do seemed distant, like the moon fading into the backdrop of the horizon behind me. My finger mashed the power button on the radio and I was almost blown backwards in an audio assault. Damn but I had left that volume up a little loud. Oh well. The fact of the matter was it didn’t matter what song came on the radio, whose voice flooded out of those open windows on ripples and waves of lyrics and sound, just the fact that it was playing was enough. I wanted to drive on like this forever. I had these moments, sometimes, where it seemed the only thing that made sense to me was to hop in the car and drive with no mindful destination, just drive for the sake of driving, the pent up aggression spilling out under your foot mashed on the gas pedal in a tense release – like the build up to an orgasm when you’re under emotional stress, the shudder before the fallout and the world comes crashing back down in on you once you’ve climaxed your last, shaky breath. Hell, I don’t know, maybe it only seems that way to me – always had a wild streak, a hitch of the old “get up and go” that usually left me got up and gone, but sometimes lingered just long enough for me to catch up. It was one of those moments for me, where I wanted to forget I possessed a brake pedal to match the gas one, where I wanted to drive into god forsaken country, as if god still possessed a part of the land around me – truth is, I think he left it long ago, left it to do its own bidding, growing wild and overgrown and tangled. Sometimes the fun was in untangling and unraveling the mystery, figuring shit out. Sometimes the fun was in just letting it grow wild and not bothering to try. And sometimes the best fun could be had just not giving a damn about tomorrow, and enjoying the hell out of today – whatever that meant, whatever it brought. For someone who lived life constantly on the edge, constantly under worry and unnecessary stress, the freedom of letting go with a side of “not give a fuck” was alluring. Calming.

And I’m spent.