No Truce

 21:45    The smell of burnt rubber was still there, faint yet noticeable at the end of every breath, the olfactory equivalent of a bitter aftertaste. One that no amount of fresh air could seem to get rid of. The windows were rolled down all the way and the night air through the forest road was crisp in that unique way forest air is crisp during an early spring night. Yet the smell was undoubtedly there. A smidgen of something almost rotten yet somehow artificial. He’d checked the car, twice, front to back. Stopped at the side of the road and combed the whole thing with his nose, inside out. The tires looked fine, the engine smelled like an engine should smell. There were no weird sounds or anything at all that looked off or out of the ordinary. Yet the smell was there, reaching a perceptive peak at the end of his inhalation and fading away with the start of each exhale. Barely noticeable if you didn’t think about it, unavoidably present once you did. Having a head start didn’t mean much when all you could think about was whether or not you’re having a stroke. There were times when he felt he could will it out of existence. Since not thinking about it was impossible, concentrating on it even harder and trying to imagine it gone seemed to work better. For a while at least. Sooner or later, the minute he loosened the reins even a little it came right back. That was obviously unsustainable. He still had a long way to go.

23:55    It’s about control, that much he figured. Or the lack of it mostly. If he knew he could just turn it off anytime he wanted, he could keep going virtually forever. Not being able to shut it down, not knowing if and when it will end, that was the terrifying aspect of it. To make matters worse he realized he had been breathing in tiny shallow breaths for a while now in an effort to avoid the smell and he was beginning to feel a bit dizzy. He made a conscious effort to breathe deeply, yet the second he hit the smell it almost felt like a roadblock. The endless scene of the road and trees ahead constantly materializing out of the dark and rolling past only to fade out behind him, did not help. The car’s headlights drew a circle of light and that  was it, literal tunnel vision, all else black and cold. There could be anything outside the circle, or nothing at all. He couldn’t decide which felt worse. The first seemed overwhelming and the second suffocating, yet nothingness also carried a sense of peace with it. Unless it smelled like burnt rubber.  

00:15   Oh God. Oh fuck God what’s wrong with me. I took the pill today. Right? Haven’t I? Breathe deep, breathe deep, breathe… God, please.

00:55  Stupid. It’s all so stupid.

01:20    Silence. On the side of an empty forest road almost an hour and a half after midnight, silence can be both overwhelming and suffocating. It’s also hard to listen for . Especially when you’re trying to separate it from the buzzing in your head after taking one deep breath too many. It's a damned and foolish pursuit, trying to listen to something that isn’t there. Or trying to see something that doesn’t exist.Or feel a lie. Or a smell. It’s like being in a sensory deprivation tank filled with electricity; scorching cold, numbing and deafening. Leaves no room in your brain for anything else. And there you are, side of the road, headlights off, in a car bursting with silence and a head that smells of burnt rubber. 

2:01    There are things floating in the dark. Little things, always moving. Impossible to lock your eyes on them —that’s how you kill them, swat them. But you can’t. They’re always one step ahead of you. Little bastards. Maybe a truce is an option? 

04:20   How long have I been driving? I don’t mean from the beginning of course, I mean since I started again. Clock says four twenty. If you were here you’d make a joke. And then you’d keep talking in an attempt to take my mind off things. It only made it worse but of course I never told you that. I never told you how every word out of your mouth only served to remind me of what I could never be completely present for. How that hurt. Not being wholly there with you, having to split myself in half and give you the numb part, all the while doing my best to keep the sludge and the muck and the blood off of you.  I refused to admit that silence might ever be a better option than your voice. But someone once told me (or maybe I read it somewhere) that everything we never wanted to do, we will have to do, sooner or later and it turned out to be frightfully true.  This road seemed so much shorter when we took it together. 

5:15    It’ll be daybreak in about an hour or so. The floaters are fewer when it’s light out. The brighter it is the less they feel like dancing. Maybe the sun will burn away whatever is causing the smell. I mean, if it was a stroke or an aneurysm or something then I’d be dead by now, right? Then again, the only reason I’m still alive could be that I haven’t slept yet. Isn’t that what they say? A head trauma can kill you while you sleep. So, don’t sleep. Ever. But I haven’t hurt my head anywhere as far as I can recall and anyway I’m not even sleepy. Quite alert actually. The clock is ticking —well the digits are advancing—so that’s something. It means we’re going somewhere, it means we’re moving. It means dawn is on the way, inevitably and mercifully at hand. 

06:00    Cinematically and serendipitously as is often the case the serendipity coming out of the cinematic quality of said case and vice versa as is again often the case a vicious circle as they say and as you like to say when we haven’t bothered to cook in a while and the pizza boxes are stacking up and the dust is now a second carpet and we’re lying on it and you laugh and remark on how dust is apparently mostly dead skin and I say so we’re lying  in dead flesh and I also laugh but I keep laughing and never stop but my laugh isn’t like your laugh because little bits of me are coming off with it and if I don’t stop laughing soon there’ ll be nothing left of me so in this part of the world at this time of year the dawn should be coming  in about half an hour or so and so in a cinematic and serendipitous and life-saving life-affirming life-enveloping death-defying and absolutely meaningful full of meaning poignant and completely and utterly true way I will be coming out of this forest road at just about that time a new dawn or a very old one older than the night if that means anything but of course it does it has to

06:33   It never occurred to him, driving through this dark forest road of endless shapeless trees, tunnel vision getting progressively weaker as sleep got further and further away, trying to swat the floating souls of everybody that has ever lived and died with his eyes and failing, the smell ever present and perhaps always there from the beginning —if there ever was such a thing and if it ever mattered— it never occurred to him that there could be something stuck in his nose. That something tiny and soft which for some reason smelled like burnt rubber could have easily and without him noticing lodged itself into his deeper nasal passages. Maybe it happened when he was a kid, years and years ago, seeing as rubber takes such a long time to decompose, it could have been there since virtually always. Enveloped in warm mucus and accepted by his body as an inevitability and kept safely hidden away from his mind,  it could have gradually fused with his tissue and eventually become a part of him. It only just started to smell because… he only just noticed. He tried again to stare at the floaters. Maybe a truce is finally in order. Or maybe he could just claw it out.   

09:45    These things practically drive themselves don’t they.