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{escape hatch} frisco macae edwards If there is an escape hatch anywhere I haven’t found it. This thing is going down, and what’s worse, is that I’m not afraid like I thought I would be. At one point this was my biggest fear, now it’s just a Tuesday. I don’t know how to get out of here but it almost feels like I don’t even want to look. I’ll be treading water in no time. I won’t last an hour before I’m exhausted. Four hours and I’ll be sleeping with the fishes, see. Of course that’s all moot anyway, the water will freeze me on contact. When it's this cold outside, construction workers will tell you to take your lunch inside, or not at all. At 40 below zero all the blood rushes to your stomach to aid digestion while the rest of your body freezes. Even the little bit that’s soaked into my shoes feels like pain, if I could still feel. I don’t know what got me here, maybe it was her. Maybe this whole thing is a giant fucking metaphor for everything that’s wrong with my life. Then again, maybe this little boat really is sinking. Maybe I’m really out in the middle of the Bering, Christ knows how far from any land. I can’t tell what’s real anymore. After awhile everything gets so numb from the cold that you can’t feel, the 4th shot after you start to slur your speech, that’s what this numbness is like. It’s not particularly friendly, and it’s definitely not warm, but it’ll do. The water’s splashing around on the deck now. Maybe I’ll wake up in a few minutes back home before that night four months ago. Wake up like this was all some kind of nightmare, and she’d be there to kiss everything better. Back home where it’s warm, in Kansas. Back where I (don’t) belong. But if I want to be honest with myself if I belong anywhere it’s right here, but goddamnit you should be here with me. You should be going down with me. I don’t even think you’d freeze to death; you’d just kind of wait it out. Float on my corpse until it washed up somewhere. Start anew. That’s what I wanted to do, that’s why I moved up to this cold fucking place. But no matter how cold it gets it’s never as cold as that night in the rain. Of course you wouldn’t know that I stood outside and waited. I waited for your headlights to shine down in the corner, and flash the way they will, so that anyone coming up the other side will know you’re there, know you’re coming. So fucking considerate. I leaned against the side of my building and waited for you to come back like they do in all the movies. In the rain. In the cold. I must have stood outside for two hours, waiting. But you never came. After that nothing seems cold. Nothing seems. I guess that’s how I got here. It’s never surprising; you hear the same story over and over. A book on tape narrated by different voices. Here’s the pre-made template, all you have to do is fill in the blanks. All these men and women that thought they knew what was going to happen. They thought that they would do _____, and______, and have_____, live in sunny______ ,and be with ______ forever. But something went wrong, _____ changed his/her mind and now we had to figure everything out all over again. It was the downfall of everything: believing in something. The downfall of believing in someone other than yourself. And they end up here, like me, running away from every problem God ever threw at us, and some how missing the punch-line. Thinking everyone at home was going: Hey, where’s Walter? Well they weren’t, and______, oh well she’s now the happiest she’s ever been with that new fuck, the guy that stole your life. The guy that took everything you were supposed to have, and now you’re freezing your ass off. ______ never asks for you. She never wonders what happened. For all she/he knows you’re still living in the same fucking place doing the same fucking thing with the same fucking people, every fucking day. All the little things that remind you of_____, in the place that you ran away to, where you thought you could escape all of that but you can’t, yeah, she/he isn’t thinking of you, so cut it the fuck out. I know you never thought you’d end up here, but that’s the way it works sometimes. You rolled a 2 on the D20 and got fucked. God’s endless punch-line. You’re the chosen one. When I told people what I was going to do they told me I was crazy. They told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life, well they were wrong. Let me tell you a secret: if you really want to do something crazy, do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t tell all those people you trust, in fact, you shouldn’t trust them, but that’s another story. Everyone will tell you not to do it, all those people that are supposed to support your decisions, they’ll tell you you’re fucking loony toons. The kids that you ask, they’ll say don’t do it because their scared and they wish they could do it, they’re jealous that they can’t do it themselves. The old people, they’re jealous because they wish they had, they’re those kids grown up, grown up with regrets. Even though I’m about to die, I know this was the best decision I ever made. Because I made it for me. Dependencies are not positive. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. They’re lying. They hadn’t thought of it yet and now, damn…it sounds like a pretty good idea to them. This wasn’t what you planned for, and maybe that’s what makes it so good. I found a tiny house for lease and I took it immediately. All that money that I had been saving for next year’s tuition, it paid me up for 12 months. All I wanted to do was get away, so I found myself a piece of shit boat, checked out a couple of books from the library. Honestly steering a boat isn’t that difficult. And up here no one really cares if you’ve passed your tests or not, it’s not the same here. Everyone has that look; they know where you’re coming from. Everyone has something they’re running away from. Someone. Everyone has no one. I work at, well I suppose I should say up until I’m dying, I worked at this restaurant, just taking orders. So many people come through here on vacation; they all want you to take their pictures. There’s the bastard. The guy that took your life, and he’s living it, look at him smiling. Smiling with your fucking life, like it belongs to him. A fisherman at a bar that I tend to frequent after work when I’m not in my boat told me a story. He told me that one time he was in this bar and that bastard really did walk through the door. Of course the bastard didn’t recognize him, neither did_____ for that matter, not with this full beard of course. He said there was a moment when he looked into her eyes and he thought she knew, but if she did she simply ignored it. Here was everything he had run away from, thrown right back into his face like a blizzard in the middle of a Texas summer. This wasn’t supposed to happen. And he told me that he wasn’t even bothered. Of course when he saw her all that love came back, but that love had turned into pain long ago, and if you get hurt enough you start to callus. He just bit down on his lips and told them how to get to the hotel, and that their daughter was beautiful. The daughter he should have had. He told me that was the first time he had cried since he moved up here. It’s the way people always treat things that look broken like shit. The first time I took my boat out I rammed it into something out in the middle of the sea. Don’t ask me what it was, I don’t know, all I know is that it cracked some of the wood, I had to come back and get it fixed, it wasn’t anything drastic. But it’s funny because I only got the wood fixed. The little metal lining the wood on top stayed bent. Kind of a reminder. And now it means something even more. Have you ever gotten in a car accident, your door was dented to hell and you have to wait for the insurance company to run you through twenty circles? You come out from work one day, and you can swear that it’s worse than it was originally. Three days later and you have to take a picture because you know it’s worse. The dent definitely wasn’t that big to begin with. Like someone is walking by and just kicking the shit out of it. Why not? Only this happens over and over, everyone walking past. Like people say, hey, this thing is already fucked, why not do some more damage, the poor-bastard-owner probably won’t even notice. Well I do. The first time the dent seemed bigger I thought it was just my imagination. A couple of days later and it was far worse, little black sketch marks on it, the black rubber warn off from someone’s shoe. That’s when I kind of figured out what was going on. Now every day I never know when it’s going to be worse, but every night I go out. At night you never know what’s going to happen. Little tufts of ice will float by on either side of you and you hope that there’s none in front. Sometimes I’ll turn off all the lights and hope that someone won’t see me. The water now splashing around my ankles, maybe this is what I always wanted. Everything is nothing out here. Dark is darker, and silence is quieter. And the best thing about it is, no one will ever know I was here. No one will ever know who I was. All those people back at home not asking where’s Walter. None of them will ever know. I have no remaining legacy, no story. I didn’t contribute anything. The only thing I’ll contribute is some debris that might make someone else’s dream come true. If I was living the plan I still wouldn’t have contributed anything, nothing but memories to my own head, the kind that you can’t take with you into the water. Mankind’s greatest fear: not being remembered. But we’ll spend so much time ensuring our legacy that by the time we’re remembered we never got a chance to live. We were too busy planning everything, and setting everything up that we didn’t look around. We spent all of our time making sure everything would be in order, so that we could get the most out of our existence, finding our wife at 19, picking our future occupation at 17, naming our unborn children at 22. This was the life we were supposed to have. One without debt, one without problems, and one with tons of things. We were so busy preparing for death, that we missed out on life. I tried so hard to hold on to everything that my hands got full and I lost it all. This wasn’t even greed, this was just stupidity. This was naivety that you don’t grow out of, the kind of thing that was bred into you. You were born here, you have no say. The same book-on-tape told in a thousand different voices. A live by numbers. Just put the money where all the 2s are. The fun life experiences, those are all your 3s. Sexual conquest: 5. But occasionally something terrible happens and we’re allowed to escape. All those things that weren’t supposed to happen, well they do. And there's the escape hatch. That’s when I wasn’t afraid. That’s when I sprayed life experience all over my 2s. And all those bastards and _____s well they can keep playing by the rules. Let them have their numbers. This boat’s going down, and I don’t regret a thing. Yeah, maybe I overreacted. Maybe this was the worst decision I ever made. But maybe this was the only decision I ever made. You’ll never be able to truly run away because there is no away when all of your problems are tattooed into your hippocampus. But if you throw everything you know out and start asking who really wants you to live this way then maybe you can. I’m looking over the side of the boat and the water is dark. The little dent, it’s no longer a dent. Someone must have come by with a sledge hammer and destroyed it, after all, I probably wouldn’t notice. One of those little tufts of ice that are always floating by, that’s all it took. Snapped the metal and now water is coming in. The water is everywhere. I’ve turned off all my lights and my GPS, maybe someone won’t see me. That numbness has left and I’m wide awake, I feel everything. Kneeling down into the water I know that this is right. The icy water, soaking into my long-johns beneath my jeans, beneath my snow pants. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to work out. I was supposed to start anew. Meet me some hot Eskimo chick and have little spear throwing babies, but it didn’t turn out that way. And that’s just what I needed. Now I’m thinking the best decision I ever had was selling my life rafts so that I could buy a GPS, who needs a life raft when you always know where you are. I know exactly where I am, I just don't know where I’m going. And as I open the hatch and step down into the freezing water I smile because I know this isn’t the way things are supposed to be. |
