I shed a tear. She was getting married to someone else and I was blinded by some weird indefinable emotion. Angersorrowresignation would be an adequate appropriation. In sum, it was a feeling of losing something already lost. As far as I was concerned, she melded to the immortal forms of my contorted imagination the moment she tore up my letter. She was a ghostly apparition telling me to go kill myself - this most finite of losses marked the end of a miserable road.
I locked it in at 140, released my hands from the wheel, and the vehicle roared off into the vast wilderness below. Dear reader, you must think I’m writing this from beyond the grave – a ghostwriter…but I’ll save you the moronic pun. I survived and inexplicably without a scratch.
“It’s a miracle,” would be the conventional response – followed by the whole litany of born-again-ism, accompanied with a righteous pursuit of the great White Picket Fence in the sky. When I got out of the crumpled piece of metal formerly my car, I cussed up a storm. My first thought, but certainly not the ‘best’, was that I couldn’t even kill myself properly. Second, the rental company was going to fuck my ass until it was green. And third, a geographical and metaphysical question: where was I?
Contrary to what cinema postulates, a car does not instantaneously explode upon wrecking. It takes some time – about twelve to fifteen disoriented paces. The flaming pile of crap metal put a smile on my face. My goodness, I thought, people pay handsomely for this type of shit. As I mulled a career as a stuntman, I whiled away the remaining sunlight wandering aimlessly through boreal city blocks. There was Mr. Owl’s home and his neighbour’s, the distinguished Dr. Hoo, and there was Tony Hawk, working on a new aerial routine. My palpitating heart - heavy with sad surrender - demanded levity, even if it was absurd and patently lame.