Free

That night I became, wild.

You shouldn’t force anything. This is a rule that most people follow. A rule that I’ve shamelessly tried to push to its breaking point on so many pointless occasions…

And I tried to talk to myself into, come on boy and just give up already. I didn’t. I never give up. This is a fatal flaw that people like me possess.

I lost traction with the physical world and fell over. At first nobody came. I could hear people and sirens in the distance, but at first it was just me and the lines of houses, the end of the winter, the humid but coldness that that time of year contains. The spring and summer just over there, but now, still cold hands and why, why did I do that?

Like I said, I haven’t a clue, well not really. It wouldn’t make sense to try and explain any of the motivation behind the madness, because it was, yeah, it was what it was, madness.

Laying there on the sidewalk I said, got to get a move on boy, and so I hobbled home and I didn’t even think about the fact that I was bleeding, that my car was dead into a tree, that my friends had seen the whole thing, that I had to accept defeat on this one, and oh hell no man I wasn’t going to get caught and gone I was gone and running faster than I ever ran before, and after I slowed time down one foot after the other I felt evolution break loose within my body and I picked up the pieces of strength and shoes off still by the car and the leaking gasoline the dark clouds of the early hour of the morning still sleeping and houses passing me by as I ran behind the alley and the piano keys of life picked up and everything just moved me and I saw where my next step would be, and over fences and in backyards and hey who are you, no time for interviews, and people looked at me but nothing, I heard nothing, only the darkness pushed me further and faster than any man has ever ran in his entire life. Dirt and trees and swinging down that way, and back through another alley I could hear the echo of where it all started but I was a mad man and I wasn’t going to get caught, I was waiting and mud mixed with burned blue jeans and my eyes scattered and all paranoid and almost out of breath; I turned around and looked down that way only darkness and then, silence….

Picking up my hands and what are you doing… no time, go-go-NOW GO, and back  running passed so many blocks and old homes passed everything along the way from where the car sat and I now came back to, to, to, to just, humanity, and it was if  I slid on snakes all the way home, back down there in the basement, in my house, and it all happened so fast.

The feet got me away, but I knew that they were coming for me, that the sprint was all for nothing, because no matter how far I ran I could never really get away. I was bleeding and shaking my head and saying, oh shit oh shit…

Oh shit is right, and for a moment the game was up. Even the best of runners have to stop once in a while, and I knew this. I knew that they were coming for me. And who are they?

Everyone.

And I sat there and for some reason I thought about the word, the word beauty.

I know this is strange, and I knew that I was in for some serious real life shit. That everything was up, that the times just got real, and I knew that I was going to have to answer that door when the cops arrived, but for some reason everything was I don’t know, exciting, dramatic, yeah, but beautiful and spinning with life.

Sick, this is disgusting, that I felt like this, after I destroyed a car and while I was bleeding from the head, right? I shouldn’t have been thinking any type of positive thoughts, right? I hope the answer is no, right? And this was what war does to you. It makes you think perverse thoughts of a romanticized love.

Nothing hurt and I wasn’t thinking straight. I put a towel behind my head and sat on the couch and smoked a cigarette. The house was empty; they were still at the party, down the street from the tree that I hit. Everything was timeless, beautiful, at least for a second in my head, and maybe it was because of the alcohol, but honestly I wasn’t even drinking all that much, my breathalyzer proved that, and it’s why they let me go to the hospital instead of jail after the booking took place.

Beautiful. Strange, and I’m not sure why I thought about that, about that word, about the beauty of what happened, but everything stopped and the sounds of life intensified, my memory sharpened, and I could feel the cement that I was surrounded by, and not what it feels like, but what it is to be cement, what it is to be the bricks that were falling out of the walls in the basement, the pipes that curved in and out of the rooms, the drip drops of the sound that came from the other room, the glass in the windows that turned white from the cold air that was out there, from the cushions I was sitting on and the six pennies, the two nickels and one fifty cent piece that were  wedged in the left side of the crack exactly one foot above the butts of cigarettes that were under my bare toes that were cut from the sticks and glass that either came from down here or from the alleys back there.

I felt time and space and became the earth under this house. I remembered who I was and that I was only, a human being.

I felt alive, guilty but free, lonely but surrounded. I felt, real…