Bleed

They arrived in the mornings during the first cigarette. Pieces of thoughts that broke off before. It wasn’t so much that he’d put wheels into motion, it was that he’d pulled the emergency brake. He’d been going so fast down that straightaway, straight for miles and miles.

He closed his eyes and lifted his hands from the wheel, it was running wide open. Flying. When he opened his eyes, he saw the curve ahead. His foot went down, no response. He stomped. Nothing. Pumped, nothing. The car was completely out of his control and the turn was coming up fast. If something didn’t happen quickly...he grabbed the emergency brake and pulled it up
fast and jerked the wheel left. The car skidded in a circle and came to rest. He turned the key back and sat there in silence, his heart in his throat. What the hell? Gandy was sitting in his car after pulling the emergency brake, knowing that he’d almost waited too long to notice what was going on around him, what was going on inside him. He knew he’d almost. At the same time, it was almost. He was ok, but the “what if” was still very present. It was all very confusing.

Now what should he do? Where do I go from here?

So they arrived in the mornings, but during the day he could push them away.

Occupied.

Make decisions and write things and plan and talk and execute. But when the workday was over, they came back again. It was in that time between work and going to bed when you’re not busy running errands or cleaning or washing or eating, in that small amount of time each day that you can spend doing whatever it is that you really want to be doing that he wondered what he
should be doing. For Gandy, this was crisis time.

For so long, Gandy had spent those hours with other people. There was a bit of a hole in his life now where the others had been. He tried to remember how he filled his time before those people, but that was no use, so long ago. And besides, things were different now. He was different now. Whoever he was now, he had to discover a new path. And the struggle went something like this.