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The truth is, I don’t really know how I ended up with that suicide note on
the bedside table, so obviously scrawled with my own hand. I don’t know how
that happened just the same as I don’t know how I ended up out in my car, my
dead car, the gun I keep locked in its glove compartment held firmly in my
hand, its safety clicked off, its chamber full. But then again, I never do.
I don’t know how I got here yesterday, nor the day before that. And I don’t
know how I’ll end up here tomorrow. But I’ll be there, right on time, like I
am every night, that gun in my hand, whether that car’s engine is alive or
whether its dead, whether I’m sitting in the driver’s seat out in my
driveway or on Route 347, at the scene of the crash, the place that the dead
engine kept me from tonight. The place offers me no respite from heartache,
rather, I think, it’s the pain that draws me there.
And those shoes, those little pink and white Nikes
with the thin, little laces, the ones that I taught her how to tie so long
ago, on a cool autumn afternoon, they’ll still be hanging there, over my
street, wherever I am, protecting my house like a gate, either that or haunting
it, as they twist and turn in the wind. That night, though, the shoes weren’t
laughing at me like they had been in the morning. They don’t laugh at
nighttime. They cry, they cry with me.
So I just sat in my car, alone in the dark,
and I wondered where all of this had come from. And then I just shook my head
and I went back to bed, slept it off, and woke up the next morning.
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