Water in hand. 18 wheeler close. Closer. You forget how fast 90 miles an hour is when you aren't in a car. Roll over the median, knee sacrificed to the safety of rolling over it. I can see my dog in the car, windows down, screaming. I don't know if I'll get out of here. How far I can go. White smoke is everywhere. My hands hurt. My head hurts.And if I had my way, I'd just lie down and roll away. But no. I walked all this way with all this water. Vroom. Starts right up. Of course it stops running a few miles from now and I will repeat this all over again. And I wonder, who do I call for help. With no phone. And no one I really want to talk to or owe any favors to. So I just walk. Trudge. Pace. I get miles from home and it dies again. I wonder how I will get home from nowhere. But then again, I don't really have a home. Not for much longer, if you get your way. Or I get my way. It's hard to tell. I wish life was as simple as an overheated car. You'd fill it, run the heater like antifreeze, and then wait for it to cool down again. I wonder what it would have felt like to have that truck slam me through the air. I wonder if I would survive it. I think I would. For some stupid reason, I am a cockroach. I keep on walking even though my legs get occasionally plucked. I mean, yeah, fuck, it hurts. But you know. There's some personal pride to be taken in one's own pigheadishness in a world that keeps seeing fit to punch you in the face, to turn your cheek like when I was a fat third grader and just wanted the world to be fair. Now I am a fat 36 year old old man wishing the world was as I wished it and the truth is, the world is the world. So I just laugh and be happy. It's just a ride. It's just a walk. I have nowhere to be and no one to see or answer to. I can take as long as I want to get home. And someday. I'll just say fuck it and not come home at all.

Photo - N
Words - S