The feeling was a pure current.

It rippled through me without any regard for time or place and just when I had found  myself collected  calm and composed I was struck by it again, grabbed and shook without restrained until I acknowledged it and had to stand up and give a bow. Only then did its intensity slacken in the slightest and there was no rhyme or reason to its motives or origin. I kept moving and held it with me because I knew of nothing else.

If there wasn’t a fizzling sound then there was a great crash, an explosion and yearning of power, a screaming droll that coursed through each pore, each lingering eyelash, each abandoned tear. I’d tried to manage it my whole life, tried to ignore it, or push it deep down where it could not drown out anything else. But it still found a way. For every effort I made in plunging it below the surface and piling on top, it would only spring out when I least expected and with just as much vigor, this time with devilish vengeance in its view, retribution for being ignored.

Vic had that effect. Somehow he’d manage to coax it out when I’d forgotten it was even there, the only one who ever made me comfortable me with it in the same room. The only one who ever made it ok to stand side by side instead of always fighting and pushing and shoving for position, for first crack at the microphone. It perplexed me for the longest time, ever more so when I dwelled on it. He turned the nauseous fear that filled me into wine, an intoxicating joy that spurred an unquenchable thirst. We would run delirious through the tangled streets, always searching for the next spark. But just as soon as he appeared he was gone, and he took that magical elixir with him.

I could feel it as his car faded out of view and the sun flare shined against any passing vision. The wine turned to inky demanding sludge once again. It frustrated me, frustrated me that he had that recipe and I did not. Thinking of it just made the slop keep churning like some old steel mill. Of course it wasn’t then that I knew the time had come, but it had. Only later did each piece fit into place. Back then it was all spinning, all lurching from one moment and one feeling to the next. Try as I might to lasso that hulking mass and bring it to the ground I couldn’t. It just carried me with it like a fly on a buffalo and I was powerless to resist.

Days slid into weeks as the sun drifted up and down, a flaming bouncing ball always cajoling and laughing at you for watching it instead of the road in front of you. Everyone always told me to keep my eyes on the road, to not stray for a second glance at the scenery roaring by. There wasn’t any time for it, and if you weren’t moving down the road what good were you?

I cant help but laugh and choke on this whiskey now, thinking back to how naïve I was, how supple for being led to the slaughtering pen. That was what that black weight in my stomach demanded, that was what it needed to survive. It fed and reveled in the march down the road. It needed the progress to death to squirm in the excess of despair.