Wreck Me

It was somewhere near Battery Park City that the feeling hit me. Like hot air hits you when you leave the airport of a tropical land, and it is immediately all over you, it consumes you and assumes you and you can no longer remember what it was like to feel any other way. The New York twilight was dark, and scintillating, a hint of green across the New Jersey and the Freedom Tower looming impossibly tall, twinkling. A sliver of new moon wavered over all, and I stopped dead in my tracks with sweat coursing along my temples.

I have had enough now.

And somehow I believed it must be true. That I have had enough. Of this self-annihilation and ridiculous games of a pretend life that never is. Of painting images where none are, simply because no one takes it upon themselves to tell me off. I have had enough of living with one foot in sanity and one in madness.

I have had enough of not living in art.

I continued running after that, faster and harder until my feet hit the pavement loudly and I thought I would throw up with exhaustion. Coming home, I began to scrub the kitchen cupboards and sing until my lungs wearied and my throat was dry, my fingers raw. Books lay open to favorite lines and dog-eared pages, and I absorbed them like brand new truths, like sermons to the recently converted. The cogs and wheels began to twist and turn around my insides, wringing out soured desires and tragic dead ends. I feel my vessel clean itself out, ready itself for brighter journeys.

No one ever looks back at their life wishing they'd taken the straight and certain.