I just snuck out to the mailbox at 3:30 in the morning, taking a chance that no one else would be about. Bills, bank stuff, some junk mail. Nothing really interesting. No people, so that at least was good.
My car is still out in the parking lot, hasn't been towed or anything. Stone dead, though. Come September, when the registration has expired, it'll be gone. They'll slap an orange sticker on the window, and two weeks later they'll call for a wrecker. Never mind that it's my personal property. Never mind that I pay them their rent. Rules. No heart, these corporate automatons, no compassion for a sick mother****er who can't cope with all the world outside demands. Just rules. Rules and consequences.
Then my lease will expire soon after, and they'll probably not renew it, so out the door I'll go, me and my junk. No wheels, no place to live, no place to belong. Nowhere to go and no way to get there: a square peg without any hole.
What is it like not to be afraid? Does anyone remember?
I wasn't always like this, ruled by fear and anxiety, governed by shame. I had brass once. I had jobs, friends, lovers. Now I sob in the night for fear of what may come, too paralyzed to change what I still can before it's too late. I see options, possibilities, but how can I take this path, that, or any when I'm so horrified by the thought of being exposed? How can I open the door to hope and change with my face disfigured, my body wrecked, my flesh rotting with disease? Who would dare come close enough to help me when the madness is so clearly writ on every aspect of my being?
I see the future, and it is no future. I see what I will do, and it is nothing. Beyond that, I have no prescience. The final consequences of my inaction remain vague, the only certainty being that they will come and I will be unprepared, as always, to face the horror, yet unable to turn away. My luck is running out, and soon will be no more.
erfect:
