June 1, 2007
If I’m going to be here a while, I may as well write to pass the time. I guess when I get out of here I can save this for my memoirs or something. It’s not like they’ve offered me any other way to pass the time in here. Let’s start with the cell. It’s a dingy off-white eggshell sort of color. The walls on three sides are concrete, while the fourth side is wood-paneled with a door. The whole thing is white-washed that same color. The cell itself is about eight by ten I’d imagine. On the back wall, there is a protrusion of concrete about two feet long that I’m currently using as a seat. When I was thrown in here, I found a stack of lined paper and a pen, which I’m now making use of. Well, that about does it for the cell…
I guess I’ll describe the objects I have with me now. I still have my wallet. It’s brown and was a gift from my late father about twenty years ago. I have sixty dollars, two credit cards, a library card, and my driver’s license. I still have my watch. It’s a nice silver color. Not real silver, I’m too poor for something like that. Just a nice silver-colored watch I picked up at a pawn shop for twenty dollars. I have my cell phone, which gets no reception at all in my box here. I have a couple of pictures on the cell phone. One of my new apartment, one of my cat, I hope they don’t keep me here too long, my cat will need food tomorrow. Oh, the pictures, I have a picture of an old man from a gas-station. I thought he looked kind of funny. I have a few pictures from the concert I went to a month ago. I got some nice ones with the band. I recently came into possession of one pen, black. It’s a cheap thing, one you’d probably pass by when offered for free at a convention. It’s free of any logo or marking of any kind. It has no cap. At the same time, I came to possess a stack of paper. It’s white lined paper, eight by eleven. There’s a good couple hundred sheets of it here. I’m not sure why these were left here, but I’ll make use of what I’m given. I’m a writer in a new town, this is what I’d be doing if I was home too.
I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what’s going on. It’s strange I could be put in here without any information on what I’m being held for. Miranda rights, yada yada. I think that’s what they’re called. I’m going to recount the night’s events the best I can. Maybe I can sue if they hold me here much longer.
So I had been moving my stuff into the new apartment all afternoon. Why did I move? That’s a hard question to answer. I mean, I never felt right where I was before. I don’t know if anybody else ever feels this way, but I’ll try to describe it. It was like my whole life had been planned out for me, and that if I stayed in Stafford, nothing could ever change. I had my whole life ahead of me, and it was a fair enough life. The problem was that I could see everything there was down the road. I had a few friends, a girl, a nice house, I had it alright, the problem was that there were no surprises ahead.
This is going to seem a little weird to whoever reads it, because I’m sure there’s tons of people who would have killed to be in my position. The first time I had the urge to leave was a few months back. Sandra, she was my girlfriend of a year, had asked me over for dinner. I was sitting across the table from her and we were talking about something, who knows what it was. I was playing with my mashed potatoes. I create art wherever I can. That’s a fancy way of saying “I play with my mashed potatoes, so what?” I looked up at something she said, and our eyes met. In that moment, I could see our life together, laid out like the plot of some dime novel. I saw myself asking her to marry me a few months later, and her tearfully accepting. I saw our first child, I saw that child’s graduation, I saw us grow old together, finally, I saw her die. It felt like an eternity. It was like one of those near death experiences people describe, where you see your whole life flash before your eyes, but none of it had happened yet. Those were just the highlights, let me tell you. I also saw in her eyes the crippling minutia of life. I saw myself working a nine to five job eating the same god-damn breakfast of toasted buttered wheat bread and coffee every day, and giving my beautiful wife the same god-damn kiss on the cheek before leaving. In that moment, I saw that I was trapped. The life I led could only lead one way.
I really got off on a tangent there, I didn’t mean to write all that out. I’ll strike it from the final copy I guess, it’s so ridiculous. Anyway, I had been moving the stuff into my apartment from the storage place I had rented a few weeks prior. This affair had taken a few hours, and I was finished. It was late evening. I drove to the bridge entering town to do what I had come here to do. I pulled over my new car and walked to the middle of the bridge carrying the suitcase I had packed for the occasion. There was a small sidewalk on the side for pedestrians. I got to the very middle, and sat down. I opened up the case and tossed away my old life, one piece at a time. I threw away my old birth certificate. I threw away my old keys. I threw away my last family photo. I had changed my name, changed my address, changed my cell number, and left without telling anyone. It had taken a while to plan, but it was worth it. Finally, I took out the last item. It was a love letter Sandra had written to me when I went on my trip to Europe a few months back. Totally impractical, since I had my cell phone with me, but I remembered how touching it was. There’s something in letters that cannot be captured by spoken word. When someone has taken the time to plan their words, and has scrawled them beautifully in graceful etchings across a bright white canvas, the picture is just that much more beautiful then a voice can ever be. All the same, I didn’t feel a thing as I watched it tumble into the drink. That was the world I had left behind.
I got back into my car. I had sat out there for a lot longer then I had planned, it was about ten at night. I was driving down I-55 when I saw the red and blue flashing lights behind me. I cursed and checked my speedometer. I was going five beneath the speed limit, I was pretty sure I wasn’t swerving. I pulled over, procured my registration and waited.
I hear someone coming. The hall echoes footsteps, and it sounds like there are a million men outside coming this way. I hope I don’t have to come back and finish this.
June 2, 2007
Well, I’m back. That didn’t explain much. I guess I’ll pick up where I left off and get to what happened a minute ago when I finish everything else.
So I was waiting in my car for the cop. I turned off my music, kept my seat belt on, and waited. It felt like this waiting lasted a lifetime. I stared at my dashboard and became immensely fascinated by how black it was. My whole car was black. The back lighting on the dash was a pale green against the darkness. I drummed my fingers on the wheel. 1234123412341234. I looked in my rear-view mirror. There was a man approaching. It was like he was approaching in slow motion. His stride seemed to last forever. More drumming. 123412341234. I felt like looking at my watch, but that seemed absurd. Suddenly, as he was approaching, I drowned. I’ve been a hydrophobic all of my life. I’ve never been able to swim. I’ve showered as long as I can remember, because bath tubs give me the shivers when full. In an instant, I drowned. This wasn’t on water, however, I drowned on the whole world. I’ve had more than one dream about drowning, but none of them were quite as frightening as this.
My head jolted back and the atmosphere rushed in. I felt the world was collapsing, only instead of falling down, it was falling into my mouth. Before my eyes, my whole perception collapsed into my mouth. I saw the dashboard rush towards me, and I tasted it in an instant. I felt the open road hit the back of my throat. I felt the bulge in my throat as I swallowed the world, and felt the burn of the sun smashing to the back of my throat, and falling down it in a splash. All the while, I watched reality fold in front of me. My eyes no longer provided me with information I could use to determine what was going on. It was as though my sight itself had become liquid, and I was watching the ocean of vision drown me. Then, I felt cold, unimaginably cold. I was all that was left.
Then I jolted forward and felt my hands grab hold of the wheel.
I looked up and saw the cop in the mirror, nearing my car.
I never got to see his eyes. He was white, probably in his thirties. His name tag said “Ducaine.” His light nearly blinded me. As off put as I was by my hallucination of swallowing the world, I choked through a conversation with him. Seemed like a normal happening. He asked me if I knew what I had done wrong. I told him I had no idea. He told me I should come with him. I complied, I’m new in this town and the last thing I need is trouble. I figured it would clear itself up in the end, since I hadn’t done anything wrong. I got into the car, and we drove in silence. I tried to talk to him, but I didn’t get a response. We arrived at a non-descript building I guess must be the police station. He led me quietly to the cell I sit in now, and told me to wait until I was needed. I noticed the pen and paper, and so I started writing.
So I was led into a room down the hall from here. The walls are the same dingy white color of the cell. The door at the end of the hallway is white too. The room inside, however, is black. The floor is black, the walls are black, I couldn’t see the ceiling, but it was probably also black. There was a light in the middle that shined a pale yellow light into a small circle in the middle of the room. In this middle, there sat a stool. Ducaine told me to sit on the stool.
I didn’t want to walk forward. The blackness in front of me threatened to swallow me. I stepped forward. I could swear the darkness smiled at me. A subtle trick of the shadows, but without shadows. A black snake on a black background shifted slightly and I thought I saw the slithering sliver shake into an “S” and then into a slightly hooked slightly sour smile. Then the floor disappeared. I write disappeared because I am fairly sure it existed in the first place. Either way, I could feel myself falling. Or was it rising? It’s strange how the extremes merge. I was either falling or rising. This wouldn’t have bothered me so much if it hadn’t been for the dark. The impenetrable dark. Shifting, swirling, writhing. As ridiculous as it sounds, the darkness was alive. I was watching a world behind a world waking up. Again, the eyes could not tell me this. All they saw was black. I could feel it.
Then I took another step.
And then another.
I sat down and waited for a long time. Finally, I heard his voice over the speaker. He asked me some questions, name, date of birth, marital status, survey questions. I answered them all, and eventually he stopped talking. I heard him murmur “I guess he’s of no use to us right now.”
Ducaine led me back to my cell and told me again to wait. I sat down and grabbed my pen to put my experiences in ink. I’ve been writing for a while. I should try to sleep, but I don’t think I could do it here. The only thing for me here is the paper and the pen.
The second time I felt it was looking at my father a few days later. I guess I should put this after the section about my vision of Sandra. Oh well, a job for the editors, not for me. I was walking with my father through his church. My father has been a pastor since long before I was born. He has a booming voice and a potbelly. The second service had just ended and I was taking him out to lunch. I took his hand, and that’s when I heard it. I heard everything my father had ever said about me. All at once. His voice resounded a million times in my head, yet it was only once. I heard everything. But I could pick them apart. I heard it all, but I heard each one. I heard him praising me, I heard him chiding me, I heard his excitement at my graduation, I heard his disappointment when I had wrecked my first car. These were the things that I had heard before. There were other things. I heard the first words my father had ever spoken about me. They were “Oh hell, the condom broke.” I heard the things he said when I wasn’t around. I heard how he was secretly angry at me for not wanting to take his pulpit, how he couldn’t stand my arrogance and lack of faith, how he thought my writing was terrible and that I needed to get my life on track. In retrospect, it wasn’t that bad. At the moment, it was devastating. I let go of my father’s hand and flailed my head from one side to the other looking for the source of the voices, knowing I’d see nothing but my father to my immediate right. He asked me if there was anything wrong. I told him it was nothing, and we continued to lunch.
It’s odd, but I think this may be a different cell from the one that I was in before. This cell is a different color. It’s still off-white, but it’s darker. And that makes the room seem smaller. Maybe it is smaller. I can’t tell. I hear steps. Time to put the pen down again.
If I’m going to be here a while, I may as well write to pass the time. I guess when I get out of here I can save this for my memoirs or something. It’s not like they’ve offered me any other way to pass the time in here. Let’s start with the cell. It’s a dingy off-white eggshell sort of color. The walls on three sides are concrete, while the fourth side is wood-paneled with a door. The whole thing is white-washed that same color. The cell itself is about eight by ten I’d imagine. On the back wall, there is a protrusion of concrete about two feet long that I’m currently using as a seat. When I was thrown in here, I found a stack of lined paper and a pen, which I’m now making use of. Well, that about does it for the cell…
I guess I’ll describe the objects I have with me now. I still have my wallet. It’s brown and was a gift from my late father about twenty years ago. I have sixty dollars, two credit cards, a library card, and my driver’s license. I still have my watch. It’s a nice silver color. Not real silver, I’m too poor for something like that. Just a nice silver-colored watch I picked up at a pawn shop for twenty dollars. I have my cell phone, which gets no reception at all in my box here. I have a couple of pictures on the cell phone. One of my new apartment, one of my cat, I hope they don’t keep me here too long, my cat will need food tomorrow. Oh, the pictures, I have a picture of an old man from a gas-station. I thought he looked kind of funny. I have a few pictures from the concert I went to a month ago. I got some nice ones with the band. I recently came into possession of one pen, black. It’s a cheap thing, one you’d probably pass by when offered for free at a convention. It’s free of any logo or marking of any kind. It has no cap. At the same time, I came to possess a stack of paper. It’s white lined paper, eight by eleven. There’s a good couple hundred sheets of it here. I’m not sure why these were left here, but I’ll make use of what I’m given. I’m a writer in a new town, this is what I’d be doing if I was home too.
I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what’s going on. It’s strange I could be put in here without any information on what I’m being held for. Miranda rights, yada yada. I think that’s what they’re called. I’m going to recount the night’s events the best I can. Maybe I can sue if they hold me here much longer.
So I had been moving my stuff into the new apartment all afternoon. Why did I move? That’s a hard question to answer. I mean, I never felt right where I was before. I don’t know if anybody else ever feels this way, but I’ll try to describe it. It was like my whole life had been planned out for me, and that if I stayed in Stafford, nothing could ever change. I had my whole life ahead of me, and it was a fair enough life. The problem was that I could see everything there was down the road. I had a few friends, a girl, a nice house, I had it alright, the problem was that there were no surprises ahead.
This is going to seem a little weird to whoever reads it, because I’m sure there’s tons of people who would have killed to be in my position. The first time I had the urge to leave was a few months back. Sandra, she was my girlfriend of a year, had asked me over for dinner. I was sitting across the table from her and we were talking about something, who knows what it was. I was playing with my mashed potatoes. I create art wherever I can. That’s a fancy way of saying “I play with my mashed potatoes, so what?” I looked up at something she said, and our eyes met. In that moment, I could see our life together, laid out like the plot of some dime novel. I saw myself asking her to marry me a few months later, and her tearfully accepting. I saw our first child, I saw that child’s graduation, I saw us grow old together, finally, I saw her die. It felt like an eternity. It was like one of those near death experiences people describe, where you see your whole life flash before your eyes, but none of it had happened yet. Those were just the highlights, let me tell you. I also saw in her eyes the crippling minutia of life. I saw myself working a nine to five job eating the same god-damn breakfast of toasted buttered wheat bread and coffee every day, and giving my beautiful wife the same god-damn kiss on the cheek before leaving. In that moment, I saw that I was trapped. The life I led could only lead one way.
I really got off on a tangent there, I didn’t mean to write all that out. I’ll strike it from the final copy I guess, it’s so ridiculous. Anyway, I had been moving the stuff into my apartment from the storage place I had rented a few weeks prior. This affair had taken a few hours, and I was finished. It was late evening. I drove to the bridge entering town to do what I had come here to do. I pulled over my new car and walked to the middle of the bridge carrying the suitcase I had packed for the occasion. There was a small sidewalk on the side for pedestrians. I got to the very middle, and sat down. I opened up the case and tossed away my old life, one piece at a time. I threw away my old birth certificate. I threw away my old keys. I threw away my last family photo. I had changed my name, changed my address, changed my cell number, and left without telling anyone. It had taken a while to plan, but it was worth it. Finally, I took out the last item. It was a love letter Sandra had written to me when I went on my trip to Europe a few months back. Totally impractical, since I had my cell phone with me, but I remembered how touching it was. There’s something in letters that cannot be captured by spoken word. When someone has taken the time to plan their words, and has scrawled them beautifully in graceful etchings across a bright white canvas, the picture is just that much more beautiful then a voice can ever be. All the same, I didn’t feel a thing as I watched it tumble into the drink. That was the world I had left behind.
I got back into my car. I had sat out there for a lot longer then I had planned, it was about ten at night. I was driving down I-55 when I saw the red and blue flashing lights behind me. I cursed and checked my speedometer. I was going five beneath the speed limit, I was pretty sure I wasn’t swerving. I pulled over, procured my registration and waited.
I hear someone coming. The hall echoes footsteps, and it sounds like there are a million men outside coming this way. I hope I don’t have to come back and finish this.
June 2, 2007
Well, I’m back. That didn’t explain much. I guess I’ll pick up where I left off and get to what happened a minute ago when I finish everything else.
So I was waiting in my car for the cop. I turned off my music, kept my seat belt on, and waited. It felt like this waiting lasted a lifetime. I stared at my dashboard and became immensely fascinated by how black it was. My whole car was black. The back lighting on the dash was a pale green against the darkness. I drummed my fingers on the wheel. 1234123412341234. I looked in my rear-view mirror. There was a man approaching. It was like he was approaching in slow motion. His stride seemed to last forever. More drumming. 123412341234. I felt like looking at my watch, but that seemed absurd. Suddenly, as he was approaching, I drowned. I’ve been a hydrophobic all of my life. I’ve never been able to swim. I’ve showered as long as I can remember, because bath tubs give me the shivers when full. In an instant, I drowned. This wasn’t on water, however, I drowned on the whole world. I’ve had more than one dream about drowning, but none of them were quite as frightening as this.
My head jolted back and the atmosphere rushed in. I felt the world was collapsing, only instead of falling down, it was falling into my mouth. Before my eyes, my whole perception collapsed into my mouth. I saw the dashboard rush towards me, and I tasted it in an instant. I felt the open road hit the back of my throat. I felt the bulge in my throat as I swallowed the world, and felt the burn of the sun smashing to the back of my throat, and falling down it in a splash. All the while, I watched reality fold in front of me. My eyes no longer provided me with information I could use to determine what was going on. It was as though my sight itself had become liquid, and I was watching the ocean of vision drown me. Then, I felt cold, unimaginably cold. I was all that was left.
Then I jolted forward and felt my hands grab hold of the wheel.
I looked up and saw the cop in the mirror, nearing my car.
I never got to see his eyes. He was white, probably in his thirties. His name tag said “Ducaine.” His light nearly blinded me. As off put as I was by my hallucination of swallowing the world, I choked through a conversation with him. Seemed like a normal happening. He asked me if I knew what I had done wrong. I told him I had no idea. He told me I should come with him. I complied, I’m new in this town and the last thing I need is trouble. I figured it would clear itself up in the end, since I hadn’t done anything wrong. I got into the car, and we drove in silence. I tried to talk to him, but I didn’t get a response. We arrived at a non-descript building I guess must be the police station. He led me quietly to the cell I sit in now, and told me to wait until I was needed. I noticed the pen and paper, and so I started writing.
So I was led into a room down the hall from here. The walls are the same dingy white color of the cell. The door at the end of the hallway is white too. The room inside, however, is black. The floor is black, the walls are black, I couldn’t see the ceiling, but it was probably also black. There was a light in the middle that shined a pale yellow light into a small circle in the middle of the room. In this middle, there sat a stool. Ducaine told me to sit on the stool.
I didn’t want to walk forward. The blackness in front of me threatened to swallow me. I stepped forward. I could swear the darkness smiled at me. A subtle trick of the shadows, but without shadows. A black snake on a black background shifted slightly and I thought I saw the slithering sliver shake into an “S” and then into a slightly hooked slightly sour smile. Then the floor disappeared. I write disappeared because I am fairly sure it existed in the first place. Either way, I could feel myself falling. Or was it rising? It’s strange how the extremes merge. I was either falling or rising. This wouldn’t have bothered me so much if it hadn’t been for the dark. The impenetrable dark. Shifting, swirling, writhing. As ridiculous as it sounds, the darkness was alive. I was watching a world behind a world waking up. Again, the eyes could not tell me this. All they saw was black. I could feel it.
Then I took another step.
And then another.
I sat down and waited for a long time. Finally, I heard his voice over the speaker. He asked me some questions, name, date of birth, marital status, survey questions. I answered them all, and eventually he stopped talking. I heard him murmur “I guess he’s of no use to us right now.”
Ducaine led me back to my cell and told me again to wait. I sat down and grabbed my pen to put my experiences in ink. I’ve been writing for a while. I should try to sleep, but I don’t think I could do it here. The only thing for me here is the paper and the pen.
The second time I felt it was looking at my father a few days later. I guess I should put this after the section about my vision of Sandra. Oh well, a job for the editors, not for me. I was walking with my father through his church. My father has been a pastor since long before I was born. He has a booming voice and a potbelly. The second service had just ended and I was taking him out to lunch. I took his hand, and that’s when I heard it. I heard everything my father had ever said about me. All at once. His voice resounded a million times in my head, yet it was only once. I heard everything. But I could pick them apart. I heard it all, but I heard each one. I heard him praising me, I heard him chiding me, I heard his excitement at my graduation, I heard his disappointment when I had wrecked my first car. These were the things that I had heard before. There were other things. I heard the first words my father had ever spoken about me. They were “Oh hell, the condom broke.” I heard the things he said when I wasn’t around. I heard how he was secretly angry at me for not wanting to take his pulpit, how he couldn’t stand my arrogance and lack of faith, how he thought my writing was terrible and that I needed to get my life on track. In retrospect, it wasn’t that bad. At the moment, it was devastating. I let go of my father’s hand and flailed my head from one side to the other looking for the source of the voices, knowing I’d see nothing but my father to my immediate right. He asked me if there was anything wrong. I told him it was nothing, and we continued to lunch.
It’s odd, but I think this may be a different cell from the one that I was in before. This cell is a different color. It’s still off-white, but it’s darker. And that makes the room seem smaller. Maybe it is smaller. I can’t tell. I hear steps. Time to put the pen down again.
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