Those Days

Some days you don’t want to go home.  You want to leave.  You want to drive and drive and drive until the promise of sleep in a bed in a motel in a godforsaken little town in the middle of nowhere is impossible to ignore. You just want something different.  Change.  You just want a different environment.  Even though you don’t expect to meet anyone with whom you have anything in common. Even though you know the highway offers nothing but loneliness and emptiness, you need it. You need a place to be empty and hollow and alone.

You need a place to wallow in self-pity or self-hatred or sorrow, something uglier and deeper than anything you’ve ever felt before. You know, deep in your belly or your soul or whatever it is that inhabits your brain and makes you worry about life and time and humanity and, even worse, inhumanity, that you need to try, try really hard, to break yourself into a thousand pieces so you can begin to try to put those pieces back together again, but this time, piece them together into something that matters.

Those are the blackest days, the days that might strangle what little there is left inside. Those are the days when a forgotten “good morning” or a letter gone unanswered can trigger the end of everything, the explosive eruptions that bring a lifetime crashing down into a throat too raw to call out for help, too far past forgiveness to ever hope for redemption.

Those times are vicious. That’s when tears are like molten glass, boiling and shredding skin as they slide down your cheeks, taking with them shredded pieces of your life and depositing them in an empty bowl that no one ever sees.

Even hugs, on those days, are lost. Even kisses and caresses and tender words are fragile and brittle.  Those days.  Those goddamned days.

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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2 Responses to Those Days

  1. Lois, I’m trying to capture a state of mind that words can barely begin to describe. But you must think I got it!

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