don’t go that-a-way
You ain’t asking, but I’ll tell you: I don’t believe in ghosts.
Or, I should I say, I don’t think we got ‘em figured out right.
What I mean is there might be ghosts, sure. But there also might not be, and since we ain’t come to a consensus on what the hell they are in however many years we’ve been murdering around this godforsaken planet, maybe they ain’t worth putting too much thought into. Maybe they’re just something we guess at but don’t, and won’t, ever fully understand.
But I do believe that people, living people, can become something close to what we imagine ghosts to be. And that’s ‘cuz I’ve seen it time and time again. I seen it in my ma, who was ‘alive’ until a few years ago but never really started ‘living’ again after losing my pa, and I seen it in the eyes of every lonely man whispering to the eight-ball as they shot pool at nowhere bars in nowhere places.
And I see it in myself, a man who wastes his mornings with thirty-minute showers and spends his evenings roleplaying a junkie—only my drug of choice is the same TV shows I watched as a kid, ‘cuz they take me back to a time when I knew how to feel, really feel, not just bandage the pieces of me together that let me trick myself into thinking I do.
I didn’t use to be like this. Hell, once I woulda spit on a lout like me. But I guess that’s why I’m writing. Alexis Mills, a girl who works at the grocer with me, said writing helps ‘shake loose all those things caught in the webs of our head.’ She’s too young to know that sometimes, things get stuck for a reason.
The day that changed me was June 13th, 1973. Some days just tattoo themselves on your brain. This one branded itself onto mine and I can still hear the sizzle. It was ninety-eight degrees hot outside and the open-roof of my ’64 Ford Sunliner let the cherry-leather seats soak up the heat, slowly tanning themselves maroon. That year there weren’t much gas to go ‘round and what little there was mamas and papas waited a couple hours in line to get, and so they didn’t wanna do it more than once a week ‘cuz it was also damn expensive. So they drove to work, drove home, and then let their cars take a summer vacation in the garage.
This meant that, for a fella like me who lived to follow his heart wherever it took him and never stay weighed down to one place for too long by too many things—or worse, people—I had nothing but clear skies and open asphalt in front of me. Interstate, and nothing but, far as the eye could see.
Often ‘where I was going’ was ‘wherever I ended up.’ Sometimes that was a Red Roof Inn with lice and cockroaches salt-n’-peppering the walls, other times it was a dive-bar that let me drink myself stupid and didn’t have my car towed in the middle of the night. Whenever my ma phoned her friends at the church and they asked questions about why I hadn’t been ‘round, she’d say I ‘wandered.’ Other folk thought I ‘meandered’ or and quite a few other thought I ‘loitered’. I preferred the term ‘explored.’ ‘Cuz back then, I thought it didn’t matter how big this beautiful country is, or that folk before me had charted every nook and cranny. I needed to experience it all, from Death Valley to the Great Lakes, myself.
Back then I’d see the schmucks of the world slaving away, sweating their souls out for just a few bucks toward rent and I’d laugh myself silly. Way I saw it, I had life all figured out—it was an adventure and so long as you saw something new every day, it never ended.
That day, June 13th, 1973, was the day the adventure came screeching to a halt.
That day, I was driving toward Texas, having finally put the hellscape that was Louisiana firmly in the past (I didn’t like the look of alligators, nor the taste of ‘em) and almost free of the purgatorial Arkansas (there weren’t nothing there then, and I’ll bet there’s even less now). Texans complain about the heat, but I’ll tell you this—at least it gives ‘em something to talk about. And shit, at least they have someone to talk to. That’s why I was doing twenty over the limit and beating my hands against the wheel in my best Keith Moon interpretation as I screamed ‘teenage wasteland, it’s only teenage wasteland’. I missed people.
At least, that’s what I told the officer who pulled me over, a young man called Jeffrey, no last name I ever learned. He brought the North down South with him every time he spoke. “Thank God ya didn’t run awff.” That was the New York north. The friendly chuckle that punctuated it, then was homecooked south. “Around heea, most men woulda.”
I shouldn’t have been pissy about getting pulled over. Looking back, shit, I deserved more than that. A ticket and a night in the can so I learned not to do it again ‘cuz I coulda killed someone. But part of being twenty-three is having a problem with everyone who drags you back to the muddy speed of adult-life, and so when he leaned along my driver’s-side door, I ain’t look at him. I kept my eyes on the rear-view, tryna guess how quickly he could get back to his car if I did run ‘awff.’
My talk with Jeffrey—Texarkana, my pa woulda called him, ‘cuz he was the type who tied places to people as if they were balloons that would float away if he didn’t—started simple enough. We ran through the usual get-to-know-ya’s. “Where ya from?” (the midwest), “Why ya heea?” (visiting family), “Watcha do fah a livin’?” (not much, just live, ha. Unless you know someone who needs work?) Much as I tried playing sourpuss, some people just know how to pull the friendliness outta a fella, and so soon I was chuckling after every word, too. But that ain’t mean I wanted to stay there any longer than I had to.
My pa ain’t give me much advice before he died, but one time when I was real little, still too short to see over the dashboard of his Buick Roadmaster, we got pulled over and afterward, he said to me: Be friendly with a boy in blue, but don’t ever talk to ‘em too long. More of their time you take, more of yours they gotta take.
Since I didn’t want Jeffrey, who was a charmer, I can’t lie, to start feeling like he had to punch holes in my words to make this stop worthwhile, I said: “It’s been nice chatting with ya, sir. You Texas men are a lot nicer than those Florida boys. They’ll pull a man over just cause they can. Make ya do a beer-walk and everything when all you been drinking is Coca-Cola. But I’m wondering, what’d I do wrong?”
“Oh, we both know.” Jeffrey flicked his eyes at my speedometer, which now sat firmly at 0, then back at me. “But ya ain’t in trouble, and my bad if I had ya worryin’ ya was. I’m just a talka, is all. Ma always said my tongue was a raddlesnake.”
“Well, I always appreciate good talk, sir. Didn’t get enough of that on the east coast. There, nobody wants to talk to each other, and if they do they don’t got nothing friendly to say. But I got someplace I gotta—”
“—While there ain’t much harhm in doin’ a hundred when lanes are empty as this, I didn’t stahp ya for nuttin’. When these roads get lonely—and would ya look at ‘em, not a Chevy or a Ford in sight—I like to stop folks and give ‘em a little wahning.”
“Lemme guess. There are crazed cannibals up ahead and I should turn around?”
“No siree, nuttin’ like that,” he said. And this I’ll never forget. Jeffrey, a boy whose smile was permanently stained onto his rosy cheeks, wilted. It was like those roses had been blanched in boiling water till their petals turned to mushy nothing. He’d caught a whiff of what he was about to say and you’d think it had given him the flu. “Well, it’s just, uhm…”
The ‘raddlesnake’ was stuck on his teeth, tryna sort out if it should spit the venomous words out or not. Eventually, though there weren’t a single other engine humming down the road, he leaned in close, real close, and stuck his arm out. He shook it southwest and, in the distance, behind a blur of heat, I saw the emerald glint of a road sign. “Don’t go that-a-way, mister.”
Anyone else, I woulda said: it’s a free fuckin’ country, ain’t it? Who the fuck are you, telling me where the fuck I can’t go?
But Jeffrey had me listening—and that was commendable. So I just said: “Typically folk try and sell you on going wherever their living. If you’re tryna steer me away, there must be some reason.”
“Oh, lots of ‘em. Fer one, there isn’t really nuttin’ to see that way. Just a Podunk town named afta some general they say died defendin’ the Alamo. La’Rue, they call it. And lots of farmland, if lookin’ at cows is yer sorta thing. But udda dan dat? Nuttin’. Just desert and folk who been wranglin’ animals so long they can’t help but think they need to wrangle people, too. If you don’t got a bible in that glovebox, they might crack you open like an egg.”
“Mercy me,” I said. “I ain’t a religious man.”
“Neither was I,” Jeffrey said. “But that-a-way, sir? That-a-way changes folk. Makes you think there must be a god. Go that-a-way, sir, and ya won’t come back. I’m sure of it.”
I raised my brow. “Won’t come back?”
“Ya won’t wanna see it again; no one wants to see it again.” Jeffrey ran his palm up his sweat-soaked forehead as he punctuated each word with a click of his teeth. “Most get lost in it. A few get away from it, far away. Those folks in La’Rue, they’re like me—they only feel safe around it, now.”
“Jeffrey,” I said. My tongue slid a bullet into the chamber. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Ya will,” he said. “Ya gunna be like us if ya go that-a-way—just anudda friend.”
Sometimes, life extends us an olive-branch of oddness as a warning. When Jeffrey took a step toward my car, it was a crack of thunder. I remember that was the only time I ever wished I had a window I could roll up and hide behind, ‘cuz his breath carried the roadside diner air of mildewed coffee grounds rotting between his teeth, and his eyes were fixed on my wheel. It was a look I’d seen before. An ‘I’m gonna take that,’ look.
This was a man who, not ten minutes ago, looked like his mama had dressed him, choked-tight in a tucked-in blue-boy suit. Now he was drowning in it, a melting cartoon character dripping sweat off his oversized cufflinks.
“Turn around, sir.” A threat. “That road ain’t known much kindness over the years, and yer not gunna change it. There are other ways to get to Dallas, and…”
“…I ain’t say I was going to Dallas.”
Jeffrey jerked, and so did I, cranking the wheel to the right and pressing my foot into the accelerator. He stumbled forward, across the road, and landed ass-over-teakettle in the gravel runoff as the Sunliner sped down the clay-colored asphalt.
“Fuck you!” I yelled. “Fuck you, boy in blue!”
I watched in the rear-view as he hacked phlegm-soaked dust into his palm. I guessed this weren’t such a friendly stop after all. Back then I weren’t afraid of a fight, and I got into more than a few down in Louisiana. All those boys, they thought they were Bruno Sammartino when really they were more George Gulas. I’d left a few of ‘em bloody, and one had probably been sour enough to get a warrant out. Now they were probably scouring Sunliner plates and Jeffrey, sweet fella, was just doing his civic duty—sweet-talking me while waiting for his ‘friends’ to show up.
I ain’t have a bible in my glovebox, but I did have a gun. A ‘Chief’s Special’, .38 Smith & Wesson. Dented on the butt of the handle from when the fella I stole it from tried conking me on the head, missed, and broke-up the jukebox, leading him to get broken-up by everyone in the bar. And if someone wanted me to spend a few years in the can, I weren’t afraid to make sure they spent a few weeks in the hospital.
But Jeffrey was steadily becoming a blur in my mirror as my tires grumbled toward the cabbage-colored road sign whose letters popped into view one-by-one. As I whipped around the bend at a cool seventy-plus, I didn’t see any towering golden arches or welcoming Holiday Inn arrows. If there was civilization beyond this point, it didn’t want to be seen. All I saw was:
L A R U E
N E X T E X I T
T H I R T Y M I L E S
I ain’t gonna shit you—Jeffrey’s words freaked the hell outta me.
I told myself they didn’t, and that he was just tryna reel me in with a story to keep me occupied until backup arrived. But I kept glancing in the rearview, worried I’d see flashing red-and-blue lights or, worse, Jeffrey’s smiling face and awff-attitude. But after about twenty minutes of my tires chewing across the American Midwest, when the sun slipped past the trees and the world shut off for the day, I finally took a deep breath and let my shoulders droop. I was in the clear, least for now, and even cops gotta sleep, so I wasn’t concerned I’d be sought-out again until morning.
La’Rue, I told myself. Would appear then disappear in an instant. After that, it’s one stop in Dallas then straight-on through to Austin and Houston. I’d have to live life at ninety on the speedometer for a few weeks, but that weren’t too different than normal. Once I got to Arizona, I’d let myself eat dinner in diners instead of scarfing food in my front seat. By the time I hit California, I’d be sleeping in hotels again.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been on the run. Hopefully it wouldn’t be my last.
In San Diego, I could make myself just another sun-tanned face in a crowd of beach-going young folk. And if they somehow caught up to me, I’d disappear into Mexico. I’d always wanted to go and I figured this a great excuse. But I’d bet my bottom dollar on those cops searching Texas ‘til the Summer was out.
‘There are udda ways to get to Dallas,’ Jeffrey had said.
There were, but how the hell had he known? I told myself I must’ve blabbed to someone when I was off-the-liquor and then pissed ‘em off and they snitched to the cops. That made sense, but I couldn’t remember telling nobody, and that bothered me. Sometimes people get a hole in their head, a lens flair in a photograph, but not me. No matter how drunk I get, I didn’t, and still don’t, forget.
There was no point in thinking about it. I just had to get to Dallas, meet a couple familiar faces, drop off some cash I owed ‘em from the last time I was around town. I thought about that, not awfficer Jeffrey and what-he-shouldn’t-have-known, as I flicked the radio off and let the symphony of the night kick on.
A month from then, I’d be up in Illinois, cruising through Joliet, and all I’d hear were the cicadas. But right then I heard a forest unbothered by the human smog of the world. Frogs, and crickets, and bats, and owls. And all I saw ahead of me was the rising moon. The moon and flashing strips of yellow that spawned on the road in front of me as if the universe were building itself before my very eyes.
I kept my mind on baseball.
Baseball, in 1973, was America’s greatest talking point no matter where you went. I ain’t claim no team, just a love of the game, and that made it easy to assimilate anywhere. In New York, they were still talking about when the ’69 Miracle Mets whooping Boog and the birds back to Baltimore, and though times were tough in Atlanta, Davey Johnson, Hank Aaron, and Darrell Evans were all having a competition to see who could punch a ball through a cloud. In Kansas, well, they were just happy to have a team, and if all else failed, almost everyone everywhere said the word ‘Yankee’ with a sneer.
Since my heart was set on Dallas, my mind was on the Rangers. There weren’t many bright spots on ‘em and hadn’t been for a while, but Jeff Burroughs deserved to be an all-star, and that kid they drafted, David Clyde, give him a few years and he’d be one too.
Regurgitating stats to the stars kept my mind busy. Maybe if I hadn’t been so focused on shoveling the thoughts outta my head, I woulda spotted the signs that things was wrong and high-tailed it back the way I came. But I didn’t. I kept on trucking, not noticing that the yellow lines on the road were gone, or that the road was unraveling into a cluster of tangled yarn. I woulda seen the trees blot into a cracked-pen ink smear, or caught the stars falling out of the sky, landing in the pool of tar that was slowly rising around the Sunliner. I woulda seen those stars blink into eyes.
But I didn’t notice. Not until two of ‘em blinked into being right in front of me.
They snapped into existence as if a match had been struck. Iridescent flashes of white-heat so scorching they warbled the night air around ‘em before marbling into pearls with charcoal-thorn pupils. They hung in midair, suspended by a shimmering shadow. Then, like someone had dragged their thumb across it, a mouth unzipped, and the last thing I remembered as I hammered the brake is this: it smiled and its teeth were bear-trap blades built to eat bone, chipped as if they already had.
The Sunliner was made to cruise fast, not stop suddenly. The car swung left and right, nearly crashing into the median that had been there not five minutes ago. The tires let out the squeal of a slaughtered pig, skidding skin onto the pavement as I was whipped into the door. When finally it stopped, I sat there a second, then pried my fingers off the leather wheel one-by-one—you’d have thought a BMW had slammed me.
Now I was the one who felt feverish. Those piercing eyes had injected venom straight into my veins. A ‘raddlesnake’, Jeffrey had said. His tongue was a ‘raddlesnake.’
I ran my clammy hands down my sweat-soaked face. My cheeks felt like elastic I could stretch right off the bone. Then I shook the wetness off my bifocals, trying to wash away whatever mirage had brought that shadowy figure to life. When I put ‘em back on and looked ahead, I didn’t see it, or its eyes, or even its bear-tooth smile. Ahead of me was nothing but darkness and road.
I let out a long breath. Tried to clear the exhaust fumes out of my lungs with a good, deep woooosh. Sometimes, people are complicated, but most times we’re simple as a staticky TV—just hit our RESET button, a good deep breath, and we’re good to go again.
I eased my foot off the brake. The Sunliner let out a hoarse ‘don’t do that again’ grumble and started inching forward as if it were a skittish deer cowering after a gunshot.
“Just been up too goddamn long,” I muttered. That’s what I got for cruising through the night. Dreams come when they wanna, whether you want ‘em or not. Stay up long enough and eventually it ain’t easy to tell the difference between what’s real and what ain’t. “I ain’t careful, I’ll start believing nonsense, like Jeffrey and his ‘friends.’”
But still, I only crept along. Because even though the eyeballs had disappeared, I still felt ‘em all over me. They crawled under my shirt, bugs wriggling around the seams and searching for a way into my skin.
So, I fiddled with the control panel of the radio. Out here, in the wilderness, some Black Sabbath would scare off anything intent on scaring me off. But nothing was right. The buttons were jammed inward and the PLAY and STOP symbols—a sideways triangle and a square—had been swapped. I cranked the noise-knob, and out dripped battery acid sludge that coated the pennies in the coin-holder below. Instead of the roar of Tommy Iommi’s blistering guitar, I heard voices. Meek, mingled-together voices.
you belong here, one said.
because you’re like us, another said.
friend, they all said.
My hands jumped from the wheel to the radio, desperate to shut the racket off—but the car didn’t jerk one bit. It stayed straight on rolling. Now, with my attention undivided, I noticed all the things wrong around me. It was impossible not to. In the ink-smear darkness, thousands of pearls appeared, spider eggs stuck into the stringy webbish branches of the melting trees.
Soon each bunched together, knitting into pairs, and mouths brushed into being underneath ‘em. Unlike the shadow from before, these had unblemished gnashers, teeth fresh and glimmering with a dentist’s sheen. With each one came a new voice. Some were squeaky-toyed, that of children lacking confidence. Others were gruff and dragged each word across broken glass, rough holes seared into their words through years of speaking through a cloud of tobacco smoke.
don’t you like it here?
no worry
no regret
no shame no sadness no fear
youll be happy if you stay
please stay
well miss you forever and ever if you dont
youre a friend
a friend a friend a friend a friend a friend a friend
I swatted my hands at the nothing and screamed. I screamed ‘til my head hurt, hoping I’d wake up sunken into the mattress of some piss-stinking hotel. But my words didn’t scare ‘em and, truth be told, their words didn’t scare me. As they came closer, walls of a new world, a confined world, drew all around me, and it got easier to listen. They whispered Novocain straight into my lungs, plucking away the thorny thoughts and replacing ‘em with clouds.
Soon I wasn’t in the Sunliner anymore. I was floating down a river, weightless, alongside all my newfound friends. They were telling me what a wonderful place this was—here, ain’t no worries. Here, ain’t no fear. The world ain’t been especially kind to a lot of folk and I was one of ‘em but here? Here I had found a one-of-a-kind miracle, ‘cuz here, everyone was kind. Always.
There, for the first time in my life, everything seemed to…stop. It weren’t like when I hit the brakes earlier, not a screeching halt. Instead it was like diving into a perfectly warm pool on a summer day, sinking down deep and never wanting to come up. Down there, under the waves, I found peace in the nothingness. Peace I never thought I’d have, nor knew I wanted.
lets be friends forever
here the fun never stops
its quiet here
quiet and thats nice
Yes, yes it was.
I let the water envelope me fully. It flooded my ears, clotting out the noisiness of the far-away cities and the mad-mouthing politicians and the guns and the bombs and the men who would be murdered tonight and the women who would go missing tomorrow. It was nothing—pure nothing—and I never wanted to leave its soft grasp.
Then I remembered it—the piercing eyes, the bear-trap teeth, the shadow.
I opened my eyes. The water stung like a bitch. The voices told me to calm down and just rest. But I didn’t see that snarling bastard anywhere and I knew deep in my heart that all these voices were his. No, belonged to him. Once they had been their own. Now he had control, a puppet-master mousing around with marionette strings. I didn’t know how. I was just sure of it.
The water flooded my mind. It was trying to flush out all my old thoughts so the ink could wash in and write new ones. Pleasant ones. I caught two words of my own through the sea of voices, blaring its horn line a barge caught in a maelstrom. GET OUT, it yelled. GET OUT—or I never would.
So as my mind went blank, eyes soaked in a languid drape of darkness that made me feel dreary as if I’d done ten days of work in one, I once again hammered my sneaker into the accelerator and let it live there.
The Sunliner screeched and shook all over, struggling to pull itself out of the glue it was trapped in. The shadow returned, appearing in front of the hood of my car, still smiling. It cooed at me in a language I hadn’t heard before, and all the gremlins tugged at the fabric of my shirt, now whining children fighting over a present that was being taken away, begging me to stay, stay, stay. But I didn’t retreat. I kept my foot nailed to the pedal and, after a few seconds, the Sunliner shot ahead like a bullet.
And as I sped away, down a road that steadily grew all the features of reality back, my eyes stayed stuck to the rear-view mirror. The shadow lived there now and I couldn’t escape the feeling that it always would. It kept on smiling like it hadn’t lost. And like I didn’t win, either.
youll be back, it mouthed.
I pushed the speedometer over a hundred and turned the mirror down. I promised myself I wouldn’t look over my shoulder, and I wouldn’t ever go back.
Because if I did, I knew I’d never leave.
It took about twenty minutes for the world to remember all that made it natural.
Towering tight-knit Lolbolly pines, the last vestiges of western Arkansas bleeding into eastern Texas, bloomed out of nothing. The night’s sky flooded with an ocean and cotton-candy clouds as the morning heat cooked my shirt into my skin. I ripped it off, tore straight through the buttons, and tossed it into the back seat. Ahead of me, the yellow lines painted back onto the sandpaper road, and medians grew around ‘em, crowded with orange, construction-work barrels that looked destined to never leave. They kept me from going anywhere but straight.
I didn’t cast even a glance back. Though I’d left the darkness, it breathed on my neck, tempting me for a kiss. I wondered, if I turned around, would I have sunken right back into it?
I shook that thought off and turned the radio on. The noise-knob slid effortlessly—no battery-acid grease—and instead of The Who or Black Sabbath, it was a weatherman with a stuffy nose who warned of more rainy days ahead. Down south, flooding had killed ten people, and they weren’t certain the storm wasn’t gonna climb its way up.
“Rainy days ahead,” he said.
Rainy days ahead.
Soon the first pimples of La’Rue popped into view. They were tiny, homely buildings built fifty-something years ago. Wooden shacks you could see the labor in, not that pre-cut Sears-catalogue junk that would come later, with misaligned lumber and nails of all sizes, whatever they had laying around to use, sticking out. They had slanted metallic roofs repurposed from well-worn chicken-coops sprinkled with cinnamon rust, and were propped up on a foundation of sandstone bricks.
It weren’t a welcoming sight. It looked the sorta place that had spent all its money and been rung of all it was worth. A place that had outlived in purpose. But places aren’t people. They don’t just…disappear one day. They linger on long after they’re needed, wilting like flowers on a dining-room table. After a while they’re just sad remembrances of a moment that attracts nothing but flies, an eye-sore everyone knows needs taken care of but is too embarrassed to throw away.
Once in a while, though, you get a stubborn place that don’t wither. It sheds the pieces that built it and replaces ‘em with new ones, but it doesn’t ever really ‘grow.’ It don’t move forwards, it don’t move backwards. It just freezes, a ghost of the past not at all interested in the future. That what La’Rue was—a town full of ghosts, frozen.
And when the Sunliner choked out its last breaths, spitting smoke into the air as its engine fizzled out on the rumble strips, I just got out, left the keys in the ignition, and started walking.
Walking toward the home I knew I would never leave.
And I was right—all these years later, I ain’t never left, not even once.
I never made it down to Dallas. And those men I owed money to, I guess they forgot, or wound up in jail, or died. I settled down here quickly, met Mayor Williamson and got a home on a good deal so long as I helped at the auto shop. They had a gal, Lauren, whose pa raised her to be a genius when it came to cars. But she was just one person and when Summer came, lots of tourists broke down on the interstate and got dragged to this little nothing town, so she could really use the extra set of hands.
I asked him ‘bout the way I’d came. He poured me a glass of whiskey, smiled, and simply said: “Won’t be the way you’ll go back, will it?”
I drank to that, and that was the last we ever spoke about it. Once, a few years later, at a cookout, I mentioned Jeffrey, and that got a kick out of everyone. He’d lived with ‘em a few years, but one day got sick of it. Crammed his Jeep full of everything he ever owned and took off. Nobody seemed surprised that he was still lingering on the other side.
“Life’s easier with friends, mister,” the Mayor said. “Jeffrey ran from his and look what it got him—alone. All alone.”
Years have gone down the drain. Mayor Williamson passed on long ago and now me and Lauren, we both got enough wrinkles that it’d take heavy-duty tape to keep our faces from scrunching up. A few folk had managed to ‘get out’ over the years, moseying on to Austin, San Antonio, Houston. But they always come back, same as we always stay, and though we ain’t never talk about it, we all know why.
Sometimes, when I’m in the grocer, I’ll see it play out in real time. Alexis will be stacking bags of Domino sugar on the powdered shelf and she’ll stop, bag in hand, and look around as if someone just called to her. But she’ll be all alone, and that’s when the realization will set in, and the worry falls off her face like meat off a bone.
The voices—the friends—they’re always with us.
I tell myself I stay here to keep an eye on it. To make sure no unsuspecting folk wander into something they ain’t ready for and lose themselves. Me on one side, Jeffrey on the other. But truth-be-told, Jeffrey ain’t protecting nobody, and neither am I. We’re just two folk guiding the right people on through.
Because having friends like ours is like being in a bar with free whiskey always on tap. Whenever you start feeling too much, just drink their words in. It stings at first, but it takes all the edge out of life. And the best part is this: if it ever don’t, I know nirvana is just a short strip away. One walk down the street and I join ‘em for good, and that’s a peaceful eternity, I think.
And sure as I am that my Sunliner is still down there, on the rumble strips, waiting for me to get in, turn that key, and roar that engine back to life, I know that one day I will.
Life’s easier when you have friends.
But for now, I’ll just stay here with Alexis, and Lauren, and all the other folk I’ve known for so long. I’ll just stay here and listen. Because…
its quiet here
quiet and thats nice
THE END