Chapter 52 — Or Get Busy Dying. So here I was. In Telluride. On a…
By: Jason D. Carter
Tags: Sobercurious, Short Story, Self-awareness, Self Improvement, Spirituality

I sat, paralyzed, and unable to unsee the scenes from my life’s jagged timeline that led me here, to this precise point in time in a universe where time isn’t measured, but rather swallowed up into black holes as if it never existed.

Tears formed in my eyes, then flowed sluggishly downward, before picking up speed, like growing white balls of snow rolling down a mountain before hurling off the edge of my flushed face and splattering on the ground.

You don’t have to do this anymore.

I didn’t feel human or real. Yet, at the same time, I’d never experienced such a pleasurable nothingness. It was atmospheric, but grounded and earthy, an undefined state that somehow clawed its way through the restrictive walls of mortality in search of the biological paragon. The one a bear cub might feel sleeping between its parents, both of whom had thick brown fur and a well-heated bodies full of elk meat and wild berries.

Whatever it was, all the sharp edges and carvings that made my brain look like a potluck ham at the end of a wake started melting down to blurs and smears while the decades of emotional and toxic sludge inside of me heated up to a boil, finally creating the steam and pressure it needed to burst out of my industry-grade plastic wrapped body and soul. I wanted to sob but couldn’t draw a breath.

You don’t have to do this anymore.

I gazed up at the sky and the mountains. Moonbeams and sunstreaks lit up the valley like a fireworks show. My world’s grand finale. An explosive indicator of her might. But also the lame signal that meant the show is wrapping up. And soon there’d be nothing left to see but agitated parents corralling sleepy kids to their cars, scads of litter, and the infinite darkness of my own world’s end.

I found some air and pulled it in, deep enough to blow out an exhausted howl, as if I were a grey wolf and finally tracked down and boxed in by an unremitting hunter. Gone was my will to run or fight. All that remained inside of me were a few withering senses that were still able to soak up the lethal frequencies pulsating off of the hunter as the tendons wired through his firing hand wrapped around the trigger of a high-powered rifle, which was held steady and aimed directly at the hole in my ear.

You don’t have to do this anymore.

I put my face in my hands and swayed back and forth. In the darkness, behind my closed eyes that were pressed hard against my hands, I saw millions of colors and oscillating shapes that had an infinite depth, like I was getting sucked into another dimension.

In this cosmic realm I heard words that sounded familiar, as if I’d heard them before, many times, even as a child. Only they’d always been too blurry and muffled to understand, as if they traveled to me from a great distance through a sandstorm, only to find me sitting in my first car hotboxing to The Cult.

But now they were delivered with an infuriated force. Like whoever had been saying them to me this whole time realized their cell phone had been on mute.

You. Don’t. Have. To. Do. This. Anymore.

The words grabbed me like the plump and sturdy hands of a farmer’s wife. They were warm and strong and held me tight. Not at all hurtful, just deliberate, deployed for a sensible and pragmatic purpose, as if to squeeze the filth out of me, like I was her husband’s best white shirt that he soiled after chasing down and dragging home a runaway hog they spotted in a muddy ditch while driving home from church in their pea-green Buick.

You don’t have to do this anymore.

These words weren’t mine. They weren’t coming from me. But they were audible and real. I heard them and felt them. They were as clear and striking to me as if a mythic goddess was sitting on the bench next to me plucking individual notes on a Lyon & Healy Harp.

Then, startled by the sound of an opening door, which, in my loopy fog, sounded more like the detonation of a full load of avalanche dynamite, I jumped to attention. I found myself shaking. And every nerve in my system was fully exposed and on high alert.

Out of the door came a short and scruffy man. He was dragging an aluminum can filled with trash. We looked at each other. He stopped dragging the can and smiled, then looked deep into my eyes, like he was happy to see me. I nodded clumsily as if to say hello. He held his gaze, which wasn’t intrusive or offsetting, but it was long enough for him to see I’d been crying, which would’ve been a hard thing for him to miss unless he was blind.

Then his face softened in a comforting way that said it was all cool. And that whatever was going on in my life, sobbing like Rickey Schroder as Jon Voight bled out at the end of The Champ, was exactly what I should be doing.

He walked around the corner of the house, dragging the trash can behind him, causing it to grind against the cement. A bothersome sound to most, but one that would usually make me come unglued.

But not now. Not here. As a matter of fact, this scratchy friction created a noise that was oddly musical, like an experimental art house band was playing a peculiar song of hope.

Sure, it sounded awful. Similar to an aimless and indulgent scream from a smug and rotten child. Yet, at the same time, there was something bold and weird enough in the experimental song’s undercurrent that scrambled my brain up in a way to believe the song would get better. Just hang in there. It’s coming. So I hung in there.

But it didn’t get better. As a matter of fact, it got worse. Which reminded me of how I felt hearing the opening synth notes of Van Halen’s Jump for the first time in 7th grade. Hopeful. Confused. Annoyed. Then angry before finally coming unhinged

But then it stopped. Instant silence. Both the man and the noise vanished, much like David Lee Roth’s solo career. And, thank God, the idea that synthesizers had any place in rock and roll.