Westbridge

I was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina. My address growing up was 20 Westbridge Drive and my home phone number was 828-693-1438. I was told to memorize it in elementary school in case there was an emergency. My house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, which means a route leading to nowhere. It also means a street or passage that is closed at one end. My neighborhood was a perfect place to grow up. It was big, but not too big, and there was a creek running through it, and there were lots of woods to build forts in. I could ride my bike up and down the streets and go fishing and hike all the way through the undeveloped properties behind my house. I had this big dog, Rowdy, who went everywhere with me. My mom decided we needed a puppy when she was nine months pregnant with me, so Rowdy was my best friend and followed me on all my adventures. Reportedly, I disappeared from the house when I was 2 years old and walked down to the creek. After panicking and trying to find me and walking the neighborhood, my parents found me with Rowdy walking back home. They were scared shitless and asked me what I was thinking going down to the creek alone, and I apparently said, “I wasn’t alone. I had Rowdy.” She really was the best dog. Whenever I got my bike out of the garage to ride down to the creek she’d jump five feet in the air and run around in circles, then she’d run next to me down the driveway and all the way to the creek, then straight in the water with me after I parked my bike. 

One time, on a camping trip, I was swimming in a lake and she swam all the way out to me, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me back to the shore. I was crying and upset that she ruined my swimming, but she was just trying to protect me. Another time, my siblings and my parents and I all walked down to the creek and left Rowdy chained to the doghouse, so she dragged the whole doghouse down the driveway, down the street, and met us in the middle of the walk back. Another time, I was playing with one of our neighbor’s beagles, and Rowdy attacked him because she thought he was trying to hurt me. She got put on a list of dogs that had to be put down if they did anything violent again, which was funny because she was fat and old and riddled with tumors at that point and had never done anything but try to keep me safe. Another time, a flock of sheep in the neighborhood next door got slaughtered and they tried to blame it on Rowdy because she was on that list. When the animal control people came to the house to investigate, she was sick and old and drooling, but she came right up to them, panting from the short walk from the garage to the driveway, and laid down at their feet. They left and she didn’t get put down for killing the sheep.

Anyway, I loved living there. Especially during the summer. While my parents worked in their home office, I’d take my bike and fishing pole down to the creek and catch dozens of small fish and put them in a pond I’d built on the other side of the bridge, or cut them up and serve pretend sushi to pretend guests at the picnic table in the grassy lawn next to the rope swing. There was one big fish I could never catch and my dad would tell me, “You don’t get that big by being stupid.” One afternoon, I built a dam so I’d have a place to swim. Another afternoon, I walked through the creek all the way past the house next door to the creek and found a mud pit. It felt like I was an explorer and I’d just found an ancient burial ground. I found a big fish skeleton and waded into the mud up to my knees and came home so dirty my mom had to hose me off in the driveway before she let me inside. 

Although there weren’t many other kids in my neighborhood, there was this boy that lived just across the street from the big brick signs that said “Westbridge.” He went to my elementary school and rode the same bus as me, so sometimes we’d play after school. We’d run down to the creek and play in the sand and the mud. One time, we found a black snake in the dam I made and he killed it by throwing a rock at it from like 10 feet away. We cheered and jumped up and down in the shallow water saying we’d never forget that.

I spent most of my time alone. I became an expert at climbing and could climb trees with no branches up to thirty feet high, all the way up to the window of my mom’s office which used to be my brother’s room before he went to college. She’d cover the phone microphone and yell out the window for me to be careful. When my dad mowed the lawn every Saturday, I’d ride on the back of the mower and be fascinated by him dumping out the fresh clippings in the entrance to my trail to the woods. Back there I had a whole villa of forts. If you followed the trail all the way to the end there was this wheelbarrow that had been left out there for years and it was full of water from the rain. I’d hike out there with an old tupperware bowl and fill it up with the mosquito infested water and bring it back to my camp to use as a sink. One time, my brother showed me that if you kept walking way back into the woods, there was a trail that went to a real dam and a whole summer camp. Our unfinished basement was a haven for giant spiders, and my mom and brother would catch them in old sherbert containers and leave them on the counter for days before releasing them in the backyard. I hated spiders, especially the big ones, but I liked watching my mom fearlessly scoop them into those containers and my brother shudder at the sight of them.

My trail also led to my babysitter’s house, whose yard was right behind the line of trees in our backyard. This was convenient because I could still play in my villa in the woods and hike to the wheelbarrow when I was stuck at her house because my parents couldn't work from home. Rowdy would follow me up there and keep me company on my voyages into the woods.  My babysitter, Denice, was a peculiar woman and very possessive of me on account of the fact that she promised my mom she’d take care of her baby if my mom had another child. When I wasn’t roaming the neighborhood alone, I was with Denice. She taught me how to draw and how to make collages out of birch tree bark. She had a rule where I had to wear shoes from November to March, which I hated because my mom would never make me wear shoes. She had a tadpole pond in her side yard where I’d scoop up jars full of them and watch them wriggle around before dumping them out. One time, I fell in the pond because I was leaning over too far trying to look at a frog, so I ran home and changed clothes before she found out about it because I was embarrassed. Another time I scooped up a tadpole from the pond and swallowed it just to see what it would feel like. When I told my mom she got really angry and said I could’ve gotten salmonella, but I didn’t. Denice would let me help her with gardening and let me build fences out of sticks in her yard, and then I’d clean up the fence and throw all the sticks back in the woods. When her husband came home, we’d have sock fights in the living room. A sock fight is where you ball up a sock and stuff it in another sock and try to slap each other with it. We’d jump over couches and hide behind end tables and lunge at each other with our sock weapons, all the while Denice’s maltese, Dallas, would be yapping and chasing us around anxious to see who would win. I always won because I never got tired. When Denice’s husband, John, would mow the lawn he let me sit on his lap and, on very rare occasions, he’d let me steer the lawnmower. 

Sometimes I’d sneak down to my house and play with my guinea pigs or watch cartoons while Denice thought I was in the woods. A few times, I snuck to my next door neighbor’s house because they had a goldfish pond, and tried to catch a goldfish. That got me in trouble and I had to stay in Denice’s yard for a few weeks. So I made a trail in the woods by her driveway that wrapped around to the garden and would pull the hose from the garage down the trail to make a tiny creek. I’d rip off the white tufts of her pampas grass to make headdresses with and stick rhododendron flowers to my face and pretend like I was the queen of the whole yard.

When I was in fifth grade, we moved. I hated the new house because it was massive and impersonal and had a gravel driveway that wasn’t very fun to ride my bike on. Even though I had the biggest bedroom in the house, I hated it. It felt so big that it suffocated me. I’d stare out the window into the giant grassy pasture and wish I could just go fishing in the creek. My mom would tell me to go out in the woods and explore because there were lots of new adventures to be had. I’d get frustrated and tell her I didn’t want new adventures–I wanted my creek, I wanted pampas plants, I wanted to live close to my friend who killed snakes and would get knee deep in the mud pit with me. The only friend to play with on summer days was my next door neighbor who was about a quarter mile away and had a laugh like a banshee. I just wanted to go home.

Unfortunately, that house was home. The bus ride from school was over an hour long, and I had to haul my trumpet all the way up the half mile long driveway everyday after school instead of running to the creek and ditching my backpack at the picnic table so I could strip off my shoes and socks and walk through the creek before hiking up to Denice’s house. Being alone started to feel like loneliness.

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Depression/Boone

When I was young, a lot of people thought I was really going somewhere. In high school, it became very apparent to me that I didn’t have what it takes to really go somewhere, whatever that means. I did read a lot and had little to no actual friends, so I guess that made me seem more mature in some weird and infrequent way. But all I really wanted was to be liked for who I really was–loved was an afterthought.

You hear things like “you’re gifted” or “you’re smarter than other people your age,” and when you’re young you really start to internalize those kinds of declarative statements. When I didn’t get into the school for science and math my sophomore year of high school, like most of my close acquaintances did, I stopped believing in the idea that I was gifted at all and accepted the fact that I was a maladapted overcompensator who was too anxious and depressed to ever really make it anywhere. I don’t say this to make people feel sorry for me, it’s just something I realized. Let me back up a bit to when I first realized that I struggled with depression and anxiety. When I was in kindergarten, I started feeling like something was off. Not that I had any of these words in my vocabulary at the time, but I was too introspective, reactive, and mercurial. I was constantly being told that I was too sensitive. I had two siblings who were more than a decade older than me, and my parents barely had time for a young child. I was often overlooked and overshadowed, and I eventually learned to overcompensate. I was–am–smart, and I think too hard about things some people never think about at all, but my emotional growth was stunted. 

Anyway, near the end of my sophomore year of high school, I was reeling with inadequacy and just wanted to graduate and get as far away from my parents as possible. My mom is a very loving woman, but her anxiety has a tendency to creep into everything around her, like a tree whose roots cause the sidewalk to crack and buckle because of the pressure. Her anxiety would find all the microscopic crevices in my mind and grow there until it pushed the anxiety to the surface and erupted through. My dad was a silent partner, allowing it and always looking the other way so he wouldn’t be a target for her unyielding anxiety. I started experiencing separation anxiety when I was about 4 or 5 because I just wanted my mom to be around more, and I feared something awful would happen to her when she was gone on business trips or out to bible study. I became acutely aware of how much time fits in between events and the time you actually have with the people you love. As I got older my anxiety manifested in different ways, and I began to understand that the less time I spent around my mother, the better I felt–but the fear of her anxiety was persistent.

When I left for college I felt this strange sense of being too free. Like the emotional space I was so used to filling with anxiety was suddenly sentient and very heavy, and the gravity that my mind had was pulling it in on me. My feelings of anxiety and depression had reached the limit of how close they could be without collapsing and suffocating me. Although I had never done drugs, partied, stayed out late, or hardly even socialized in high school, I quickly discovered that drinking and smoking weed were the only things that kept me from feeling like an alien. The first time I smoked, I remember feeling like I didn’t care about anything but myself, which was strange and new, and I liked it. I started getting high everyday and drinking nearly every weekend. Being able to escape was so new to me. I also happened to be really good at college, which was no surprise because there was no other option if I wanted to maintain my fallacious sense of freedom. All through high school, I wanted to major in psychology and become a therapist. By the time I was three quarters of the way through senior year and had scored a 5 on my AP Psych test, I realized I didn’t believe in psychology anymore and didn’t care about going to a good school, which was the only thing my mom cared about. I picked the first major on the list of majors at App State that seemed even remotely interesting because I had burnt myself out trying to prove something. I was always ahead on assignments, always studying, always doing sports, playing an instrument, reading a book, working on my resumé, doing SAT prep. I was just tired. So I majored in apparel design and merchandising. Taking art classes all the time sort of broke me. Art was all I wanted to do after that, and only wanting to do art is a scary thing. 

Shortly after smoking for the first time, it became the bedrock for my closest relationships. If there wasn’t weed, I wasn’t going. My friend Milo, who I had known since we were in 6th grade, was my dealer and best pal in Boone. Everyday, he would pick up our friend Sawyer, who went to high school with us, and then me, and then we would go park his shitty Honda at their friend’s house and pass around Sawyer’s bong that he kept in the console of Milo’s car. My ambitions crumbled with each hit as I rapidly started forgetting that I wanted anything better at all. It would be years before I realized I had dreams that I was throwing away.

Milo and I met when we were 11 at an indoor soccer camp, and although we had drastically different lives and went to different middle schools, we managed to maintain a friendship for seven years before going to the same college. He went to App because it was the only school he applied to; I went because my girlfriend went there and because my mom wanted me to go to Chapel Hill. I did get into Chapel Hill, but the thought of living in Chapel Hill made me feel dead inside. The high school we went to was very small and very strict compared to the other schools in our town. Milo and I didn’t exactly fit in. He didn’t hang out with anyone from school because he got a job downtown and spent a lot of time doing drugs and partying with his work friends who were mostly homeschooled. I didn’t hang out with anyone because my mom wouldn’t let me and because I started to adapt to being alone and generally preferred it. There was one time freshman year that I showed Milo my boobs in this coffee shop bathroom for no good reason other than to do something my mom wouldn’t like if she found out–and because she would never find out. Milo was one of the only people I could do weird things around and know that he wouldn’t care.

Our high school had this tradition called the senior play, which was a theater production that all the seniors were supposed to be involved in in some way. Milo and I were the only two people in our class who didn’t participate. We both had jobs and a fervent distaste for being told what to do. I had so much structure at home I felt like I was being walled up in cement; Milo had little to none. When we ended up at App together, I wasn’t surprised and felt incredibly grateful to have him around. Sawyer was a mystery. Milo and Sawyer’s parents had a law firm together when they were young, and Milo knew him since 4th grade, but I barely knew him in grade school. He was a work boot wearing, book hating, trouble causing nuisance as far as I knew, so I stayed away from him. The only real memory I have of him from high school is from AP English class our junior year. He was pretty lanky and would wrap his legs all the way around his desk to prop his feet up on it until our teacher noticed. She would say to him “Sawyer, get your feet off my desk. Why the hell did they even allow you into my class?” Based on his grades I figured his mom had come in and demanded that he be allowed into the AP class. He disappeared after junior year, and even though we hung out everyday in Boone, I never built up the courage to ask why.

The three of us clung together and reminisced often on the fact that we were outcasts. We smoked together everyday and found our common ground. I like to think we all loved each other in a compulsory way, like loving family members you didn’t choose. In the back seat of that Honda, I felt liked for who I was, even when I was being made fun of for getting too high and getting paranoid, or when I was too quiet just so I could listen to Sawyer’s absurd stories with  the music as a backdrop. For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I belonged with these people and that weed was the lynch pin.

I thought college would be different and that I would be able to fit in with people who didn’t know me or my reputation in my small town, but I think I was so broken that I’d lost all hope of ever having a normal friend group or fitting in with my classmates. Weed made me not care about any of that because, for the first time, I felt like I had a friend that would always be there. Since DARE in the 5th grade I had been told that weed isn’t addictive, so I never thought about the fact that reliance on a substance, no matter what science says, is addiction. I remember my mom saying to me one time after she found out about me smoking, “I don’t want you to live the life of an addict. Dope is only going to desensitize you to that lifestyle.” At the time, I thought she was nuts.

So. I went on with my lifestyle, got good grades, and hung out with burnouts, because those were the only people I could relate to. Everyday we’d go to the gas station closest to campus. Sawyer and Milo would alternate putting five dollars in the gas tank and split a pack of Traffics. We’d go to the bank once a week so Sawyer and I could get cash out to buy weed. The guy we were buying from then–since Milo could only get weed when he went back home to Hendersonville–was also named Sawyer. We called him Asian Sawyer. He was a dental student who worked at the diner on 105 in Boone. We usually met up with him behind the restaurant, and he would give us the weed in McDonald’s bags or take out boxes. One time he gave me my share stuffed between the pages of a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

Everyday, before and after our classes and once before bed, Milo would pick us up, we’d drive to the house that we called the octagon house, and smoke. Milo and Sawyer would smoke cigarettes and we’d all pass the bong around three times. Eventually, I broke up with my girlfriend because I stopped loving her. She got in the way of my routine, and I was getting tired of always feeling the need to people please. I called Milo and asked him to pick me up after I broke it off with her. He happened to have broken up with his girlfriend on the same day, so we walked around campus late that night in the freezing cold talking about high school and our ex-girlfriends and how funny it was that we were there together after so many years of knowing each other. 

A couple weeks later was Thanksgiving break, so Milo, Sawyer, and I went back home to Hendersonville. It was the first time I’d been home for more than a day or two since leaving for college. I hated it. It only reminded me of why I felt so trapped there and all the emotions I was trying to escape from. I spent a lot of time hiding in the woods behind my parents house smoking weed and sneaking out in the middle of the night to lay in the grass and wish I was sitting in the back of the Honda with Milo and Sawyer, getting high and listening to them bicker over the music selection. A couple days before classes started back, I drove home earlier than I planned because I was so bored and lonely. On the drive back to Boone, Milo called me and asked when I’d be back in town. He was already there and when I told him I was on the way he mentioned that his mom had given him a bottle of Crown Royal and that he picked up an ounce of weed while he was home for Thanksgiving. I drove straight to his dorm when I got to town. We stayed up late listening to music, drinking whiskey, and taking periodic trips to his car to get high. When the two of us were finally sated with laughter and intoxication, we decided to get some sleep. He said I could sleep in his bed with him if I wanted to, which was a lofted twin bed that smelled like feet. I guess I was drunk enough to say yes because I climbed up to his bed and snuggled in next to him. After a few minutes of laying there in the dark letting my buzz rock me to sleep, Milo said he really wanted to kiss me. We did kiss. Earlier that night he said “my mom always told me that I’d end up marrying my best friend,” and after he said that a strange tension bloomed up in between us. After we kissed he asked if I wanted to have sex, and after I said yes he said things would be different forever if we did. Things were different. Since then, they always have been. 

About a month later we were in a relationship, and I spent most of my Christmas break at his mom’s house with him. I’d sneak out of my house before my parents were awake and crawl into his bed. He’d wake up and I’d be smoking his weed or all balled up in his sheets. I rarely slept a full night because I couldn’t quiet my mind, but laying in his bed wide awake was a thousand times better than trying to sleep in my old bedroom, staring at the ceiling and remembering the trauma of feeling completely and utterly alone–helpless. 

When we got back from Christmas break, things between Milo, Sawyer, and me were different. Not in a good way, but in the way that there was a tangible tension under the surface of every interaction. I got to sit in the front seat and Sawyer had to sit in the back. When Milo and I got in the slightest bit of an argument Sawyer would butt in and try to drive a wedge between us, making the most insignificant of conflicts seem like an ultimatum. I started feeling less and less like I belonged. I would lay awake in my bed at night missing the times when we could all just smoke and I could silently bask in my rare and newfound comfort in the back seat of the Honda. 

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I wrote out this letter before I took everything in the medicine cabinet:

I took everything in the medicine cabinet, but I fed the cats and the dog. I’m sorry if there’s any vomit. Tell my parents I’m sorry too, and that I wish they would’ve been more emotionally open when I needed it and less critical when I didn’t need it. Also, I love you very much and wish you the best. Please take care of the animals—I know you will. The truth is, I’ve known since I was a kid this was going to be the way out and I’ve isolated myself from people ever since I realized that. No need to drag people down with me. I was going to become a teacher so I could transfer any semblance of hope I have to kids who need it, but I think that ship has sailed, along with thousands of dollars in tuition money and any sense of self worth I had. So anyway, here’s to you, my love. You are one of the only things that kept me hanging on this long—you and the pets and my sister’s kids and my brother. Oh yeah, I guess I should say something to my brother since this is rather sudden and these are my last words. Tommy, I love you very much and you’ve been a wonderful companion to have on this very confounding journey of life. Thank you for all the book recommendations and the music; I think of you very fondly. I hope that one day I’ll see you again, whether you believe in heaven or not, and you can tell me about all the wonderful adventures you went on. I guess to Denice, thank you for praying for me to be born, but I’d like to go now. I didn’t try to see you beforehand because I didn’t want to be talked out of killing myself. I love you and your unbreakable faith. I apologize the most to you because I know you loved me more than anything for a while there, and still love me very much. I think I’ll start the process now. Hinton, you are perfect.

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CALM

There’s something unsettling about that calm-before-the-storm feeling, especially when you’ve felt the storms life is capable of creating. I remember feeling that eerie calm this past summer, like standing in a big open space right before a thunderstorm, the air hanging thick with magnetism—warning you that the sky is about to split wide open. Limbically it feels more like a strange, tangible emptiness around you. Almost like the air is numb and it’s numbing you from the lungs out, preemptively anesthetizing you for a horribly painful situation.

I had this feeling driving home one day. I remember leaving work and being instantly engulfed in the soupy June heat. I was getting off at noon during the hottest part of the day—my head already swimming in the disorienting sobriety induced by a full shift of work in a fluorescently lit hotel kitchen that felt about as hospitable as an operating room. I still had a few errands to run before I retreated into a quiet weekend of smoking and day drinking by my apartment pool. After picking up some weed and gin I made my way to Ball Photo to drop off a roll of film from the previous weekend’s beach trip.

Driving home from the film store is when that vacuum-like emptiness began to feel like an envelope all around my head. Things were too calm. I passed a fire truck in the tunnel that separates the residential part of town where I live from the grocery stores and auto body shops. The lights were all flashing and they barreled by me at an appropriately urgent speed, but there was no noise, no sirens, just the vacuum of whooshing air that lightly shook my compact car as the truck passed. As I exited the tunnel I felt a gentle sense of relief at the thought of being closer to home with my bong and lack of obligations.

I turned onto my street and in an instant the storm was right over my head. Suddenly there was a sick, earsplitting explosion. I heard crunching sheet metal and breaking glass, a sound so unfortunately familiar to me. My windshield shattered abruptly, the fingers of breaking glass splitting out from a central position, creating a spiderweb pattern around a depression the diameter of a human skull. I felt that instantaneous preservative numbness flower inside of me like a black hole in my chest where all sensation folds in on itself and leaves the body. I thought of the accident I had a little over a year prior. The gruesome, fracturing sound, how hard an impact had to be to crunch up a car in a matter of seconds.

Thankfully, my threshold for cold rationality is pretty low. I grabbed the baggy of weed I just bought, ran around to the trunk, and threw it under the spare tire. As I was getting back around to the crumpled body that lay groaning in front of my car an officer arrived, already asking rapid fire questions before he was fully out of the vehicle. He happened to be behind me coming towards downtown. The pedestrian was folded up, pitiful and still. Across the street at the State Farm office a younger blond lady looked timorously at the body, then up at me making hesitant eye contact. There was a new look in her eyes, one I had never seen, one that reflected an unfathomable disturbance at the sight of someone bleeding out in the middle of the street. Blood bloomed in slow motion onto the pavement, the thick red stuff coalescing with the hot asphalt.

I didn’t see the man until he was rolling off my hood, which is what I told the officer who arrived there first. The officer asked if the man was in the crosswalk. He wasn’t. Recounting what I had seen while watching the blood insidiously pool around the man’s now convulsing body felt much more bureaucratic than I would’ve expected it to. I honestly didn’t feel much of anything, let alone have any idea where to start feeling.

The next half hour passed in chaos, unpleasantly warped by tragedy, while the heat waves settled into our foreheads and cheeks, sweat pilling up along my hairline. I kept thinking about how hot the man must be lying on the pavement. Realistically he probably felt nothing. Two other police cars arrived, one of them with two black women who came over and began asking me for identification; a middle aged, white, male officer stepped out of the other one and asked me if I was okay. I wasn’t. A silent fire truck arrived like the one I saw in the tunnel; one of the men that stepped out handed me a bottle of water. Then another cruiser arrived with a younger, much smaller male officer with sleeves of tattoos who was very stoic. Another sheriff, officer Derrick, began talking to the officer who arrived first. I just stood there in front of my car in the middle of it all for a while.

An ambulance arrived; a horde of EMS workers efficiently and militantly kneeled next to the body, which was no longer convulsing–or moving at all. I asked them with a flat affect if he would be okay knowing full well he would be dead before they could get him to the hospital. They looked up briefly at me with blank stares, then back at the man. I watched six or eight of them systematically roll his limp body onto his back and sit him upright, which is when I saw his face for the first time. It was unclear which part of his skull hit the windshield first, but his face and entire anterior was covered in blood. The thick cadmium red plasma was sickening, obscuring all his gaunt features in a veil of viscous horror. His eyes were closed. Blood dripped from his disfigured face into his open mouth as I stared, empty and perturbed at the sight of shattered bone and liquified brain sloughing from the back of his skull. He had all but bled out right there in front of me when Officer Derrick herded me away from the scene and said it would be best if I didn’t watch. I was captivated by the EMS team hoisting the man’s sloppy, dead weight onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance. Then he was gone.

I didn’t actually get confirmation that I killed the guy until three days later; it took three more months after that to get his name. David Joseph Vanderhorst. A short while after they took the body a crime scene investigator showed up and took photos of the accident site. It was like a movie. They put out little yellow number markers to determine the angle and speed and whether or not I was at fault. Then a tow truck arrived to haul my car to an evidence warehouse. I sat on the curb and watched a grim looking man with a cigarette half hanging out of his mouth hook my Honda up to his truck and drive away. Through the trees an elderly black couple huddled together on their patio and watched the whole devastation play out. No one actually saw the impact; passerbyers watched like an important sports match was nearing the end. I thought a lot about that. Curiosity was the only emotion in their eyes, not concern or sadness. 

A few days later I was allowed to retrieve the items from my car, which was in a shop with a bunch of other cars damaged in unsettling ways. The windshield still had flesh embedded into the cracked glass. There were several drops of dried blood on the hood still, and a small dent where the man’s body had hit. I tried desperately to feel anything other than a cold urgency to get away from that car. A couple days after that my car was towed to a shop in Hendersonville where it sat for the next two months. Apparently the man working on my car died shortly after they took it in.

For the rest of the month of June and all of July I stayed home as much as possible. Whenever I did go out it was mostly to get drunk. I painted for hours every day, trying to avoid letting the horrorshow of the accident play out in my head. When that sticky molasses sadness started seeping into my mind I eradicated it with copious amounts of alcohol and weed. I thought about that calm feeling a lot, though–I still do.

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