Sunday drunk in Dewitt. Again. Not exactly sure why that keeps fucking happening. Or what triggers the urge to consume liquid stupidity to the point that the voices actually dim. And the panic fades. Even if it’s just for a heartbeat of a Clinton County moment.
I never intend for it to happen.
It just does.
Because there I was again. Closing down the same Old Town haunts. Chatting up different ghosts, while pounding down the Sunday rounds. Embracing the A.B.V. of it all. Because there is fuck all else to do here in the Mittened wasteland. At least when there aren’t tin monsters to fight. And the last of lost weekend hours yawn in a 517 dial tone nothingness.
Ripping raw down around Stoll Road. Just to feel alive. And to tease the gathering deer fattening themselves ahead of the coming lean months to finally take charge. And maybe collide this time with more accurate intent.
Because at least that would be fucking funny.
Instead, I cut unscathed through the fields of musty corn. That chemically laced harvest not quite ready yet for the reaping. Inconsistent headlights reflected off the regimented rows of bounty standing like soldiers. The ones reaching up to caress the hidden face of a new moon. Because everything alive likes the feeling of touching the stars.
And I envied the purity of that natural purpose.
Because all the feral creatures not really alive are left abandoned to push hard through the dimming haze of a low hanging September fog. Orphaned in the mist of that ethereal reminder that the starving winter isn’t far away. You can actually smell the seasons starting to change that far away from the stink of the dirty Boulevard. And feel the shift away from the hardness of a dessicated Ingham summer left baked behind.
The constant shifting made old bones ache. The familiarity of surroundings caused older wounds to itch. And the fresh ones recently sustained from fighting those unpredictable tin monsters to bleed anew.
I could only drive straight at the four way after a cursory yield. The one just over the hill and down past the holler—a word not often used here in the land of Q.D. Zombies. But it seems to fit. And that peculiarity of language pushed me ahead instead of allowing me to turn right. Driving nowhere instead of heading somewhere I used to know.
Because we said all the wrong things. And the directions somehow got muddled in the confusion of too many broken hearts.
Which is exactly why I don’t trust myself to drive down that road anymore. Because it was all just another fevered hallucination. And I just can’t bear the feeling of that untrustworthy asphalt under my tires.
It was a cloying deception so sticky in its seductive addiction that I’m not sure I could ever drink away the bond forged in the furnace of our traumas. But it sure as fuck seems like I’m gonna to try.
Because it’s a terrible feeling realizing that no one wants you. It leaves a lingering inequity in the great many battles of who really gives a fuck.
So I drank more than my fill. But I drove away empty. As empty as that September Michigan road. The one along which I swayed brittle like those encroaching lines of yellowing corn. And just like that corn, I bent.
But I did not break.
I could only kill the time.
And wait impatiently for that final harvest…
