Flashes of headlights pass my eyes at seventy miles per hour. I stared out into the hazy highway for a long while. I don’t know where I’m going or where I may end up. My brain is like the morning sky. Except the fog in my brain doesn’t clear after 9am, and the sun never shines brightly in the top right corner. There are times I wish my life were like a colorful kid’s fingerpainting with poorly designed cars and cows and pastures. Instead it is a drunken artist’s attempt at an abstract painting. The different strokes of gray and black suffocate my brain like a claw in a claw machine, except there is no prize.
There are times that I wish I was normal. Times that I wish I could wake up every morning without my fifty milligrams of serotonin supplement just barely keeping me afloat. I wish that I could read happy books and poems without thinking that I will never be as happy as they are. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a black and white movie. I come back from my “pity-me moment” and notice the stop sign to the right of the road. I plow through it but keep my eyes straight ahead, expecting my world to burst into flames like I so wish, but I hear nothing. The sound of nothing. Does nothing to a neurotypical person sound like a white noise, or just pure silence? Does their brain ever shut up enough to hear the white noise? I wish I could hear the silence.
I walked out of my job only forty minutes ago. They never appreciated me anyway. I decided on a whim in the bathroom that I would leave and never come back. My boss dead named me for the millionth time, and I am so sick of it. The sun was still out when I left, but it is finally setting through the silhouetted mountains to the right of the road. How did I become a mentally ill, twenty-six-year-old man with a dead-end job? I am not sure where I am currently, and I’m not even sure which direction I’m headed. I think I am headed south of Albuquerque, but the signs are confusing, and I don’t feel like trying to figure that out. All I know is that I am going to end things tonight.
My brain has never felt this tired. For a second, I thought about just crashing into the oncoming car and just ending it now. How much easier would it be if I were just dead? I never thought it would get this bad. The craving I have for death puts me into physical pain; I just want to be normal.
The haze I see still hasn’t cleared, but I’ve been driving for too long to care. I finally see the sign for Las Cruces. The city is only four miles away now, and I can feel my eyes getting heavier with every mile. A few mile markers pass, and I see the dingy motel I found online on the left side of the road, so I pull in to stop for the night. Hopefully I won’t ever leave. I get out of the car and slam the door behind me. I feel like the world beneath me is crumbling and my knees are giving away. I really lost track of how long I’ve been on the road. Just as I walk through the automatic doors into the motel lobby, the old lady at the front desk greets me with a smiling face.
“Good evening, sir. What can I help you with today?”
“I just need a room for the night please.”
“Oh Okay! can I see your ID?”
I sift through my pockets to find my wallet but it’s not there. My heart starts racing and I get that sinking feeling, until I reach a bit further in my front-right pocket and find the damn thing. I breathe a sigh of relief and hand Patty, according to her nametag, my ID.
“Oh, Andrew! What are you doing in Las Cruces?” She looks up from my ID and smiles. “I see here you live Santa Fe.”
“Oh, just driving, really. I’m thinking about moving here permanently so I thought I’d check out the city first.” I lie through my teeth.
“So, it’s just you, one person, for the night I assume?”
“Yep.”
She frowned a bit at my response. I think she could tell I was not in the right headspace to be having conversation, so she just left it at that.
“You’ll be in room 212, and your check-out time is going to be around noon tomorrow. Is that okay?”
“Yes, that’s fine”
She hands me the keys with a look of somewhat worry, and I hand her some cash to cover the payment. The keys jingle as I walk out of the lobby and back into the car. I drive to a spot closer to my room and grab my water that I stole from work before I left. I fumbled with the keys for a bit until they finally opened the brown-stained door. The room seemed pretty standard. One queen sized bed with an old box TV, nightstand, and a desk. The room smelled a bit moldy, but it couldn’t be the worst thing that I’ve ever put my body in. I turned the TV on to help my mind unwind. It felt as though I’d been using my brain all day to do calculus or something.
Around midnight I walked to the corner store to buy some booze and cigarettes. I came back into the room with the bags in my hand and immediately started drinking. The room was designated no smoking and I couldn’t be bothered to sit or stand outside. Reality began to fade more out of my grasp, and I felt like I could barely feel my face.
I stumbled into the bathroom to pee and found an old, rusted razor blade in the trash can. I have tried to stay away from razor blades since I was in high school when my mind went to shit. Something about the cold metal running over skin is like endorphins. It was the only SSRI that ever worked for me. The thought of it slicing my neck was even more appealing now. I reached for the bottom of the trashcan, eyes bloodshot and swollen from weeping uncontrollably. I lay on the bed and admire the piece of metal. The answer to my problems. The only way out. As I calm down a bit, I admire the piece of metal that could be a way out of this mess, but I rest it on the nightstand instead. Maybe tomorrow.
CNN plays in the background as I drift a bit in and out of consciousness. I thought about how warmly Patty welcomed me and my heart smiled for the first time in a while. Maybe I’ll wake up and be magically fixed? My brain will rewire itself during my sleep and I’ll be cured. If only it were that easy.
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I wake to my phone alarm buzzing for work that I did not have to actually attend. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I roll over to turn the alarm off to get some more rest. I only wake up again when I hear a banging on the door. I get up lazily to see who it is, and it looks like Patty, the old lady from the lobby. I opened the door.
“Drew, look at what time it is!”
She looks me up and down, probably wondering why the hell I’m still wearing the same clothes from last night if I actually had places to be today.
I look back at the clock, 12:24pm. Did I sleep for that long?
“Oh my god, sorry. I didn’t mean to sleep for that long.”
“Well, I came to check on you because of how you were acting last night. I honestly didn’t know if you were going to answer the door.”
“What do you mean?”
“People stay here so often just to commit suicide, and I thought you were another one.”
“Wait, what?”
I knew exactly what she was talking about. I chose this hotel for a reason.
“Yeah,” she sighs, “I can’t even count the number of times I have walked in to clean and found a body or something else that I didn’t want to see.”
“Well yes, I’m okay. I’ve got to get going though, I have some sights to see and places to tour.”
She knocks on the door frame and sighs telling me to come to the lobby when I was ready to check out. I nod and close the door. I look in the mirror for the first time in days. I don’t recognize the skeleton staring back at me. My dark brown hair is tussled and greasy, my dark circles are worse than they’ve ever been, and my eyebrows seem to have a permanent furrow. I snap out of my trance and try to make myself at least a bit more presentable. I don’t have any other clothes, so I just wash my face with the soap and water in the bathroom. Then, I make the bed a little bit to make it easier for the cleaners. I would hate to be more of a burden.
When I get back into the lobby to turn in my keys, I see a new woman standing behind the front desk dealing with another customer. I guess it was Patty’s time to go home. I can’t help but feel a bit sad that she isn’t here to check me out, I felt like she might have actually cared or listened.
The woman at the desks waves me on after she’s finished with her first customer and flashes me a smile, wide enough that I could vomit.
“I’m just checking out of room 212.” I say as I hand her the keys to the room, our eyes meeting.
“Okay! We will just be sending you an email with a surve—”
“Did Patty already leave?” I interrupt without realizing.
“Oh, Patty? Yeah, she did.”
“Oh, okay. I was just wondering.”
“Okay, Andrew. Well, you’re good to go. Have a great day!”
I smile back at her while walking out of the lobby. Going through the motions. I hop back in the car and prepare for another long drive to nowhere. I still have no destination. I just want to drive away and never go back to Santa Fe.
So here I am, driving again on the highway. I’m thinking that Ruidoso should be my next stop, or maybe my next stop could be Roswell? My stomach growls, but I ignore the rumble and turn the music up. “Dust in The Wind” by Kansas blasts through my speakers and I sing along unapologetically. My dad used to play this song in the car when I was a kid, and I still knew every word.
I close my eyes
Only for a moment, and the moment’s gone
All my dreams
Pass before my eyes, a curiosity
Dust in the wind
All they are is dust in the wind
The song could not have come at a better time. I pull off onto highway 70 to head Northeast towards Ruidoso. The cool air blows onto my face and for the first time in a while, and I can grasp reality for just a short while. The wind blows on my face and hands. It is after 9am in my brain and the fog is finally gone. The sun shines on my skin and the pavement rumbles beneath me.
Nothin’ lasts forever but the earth and sky
I roll up to a stop sign, but this time I stop. No longer do I wait to hear the screeching of tires and honking of horns. I don’t wait for the crashing and burning of living. The music courses through my veins like heroin. I open my eyes during the instrumental and glance over to the car beside me. Inside the red Ford next to me is Patty, the lady from the lobby. I smile and she smiles back. I stayed there a while with my eyes glazed over until her hazy silhouette inched past the stop sign. A delicate honk from a silver sedan behind me brought me back into reality. As I inched forward through the stop, I watched Patty keep driving into the White Sands of New Mexico.
Rebecca Butler 