>>18666990
I decided to get in the car and drive. I didn’t know where I was going. I still don’t. After a while I realized that I was heading west. Subconsciously trying to get closer to her, perhaps? People disparage the fields of the Midwest, calling it flyover country. It’s always bothered me to some extent. Are acres of cornstalks really more banal than the monotonous urban blight of Los Angeles and New York? Do you really find the visual of a perched hawk more unsightly than the homeless fentanyl fiend slumped comatose on the sidewalk? Is Tokyo an objectively better place than the rural Ogori? Better yet, are the American cities that she evidently longs for?

Driving masks some small fraction of the neurotic synapses. Instead of the whole of your brain being utilized to dwell on the agony it drops to, say, 95%. I’ve found that it’s more effective for me than alcohol or cannabis. I never understood the people who choose to self-medicate with these substances. They never take my pain away, they just add a splitting migraine on top of it with a lovely dash of either psychosis or cirrhotic liver on the side. It’s funny, I question those people with an attitude of smugness, as if I haven’t been dependent on sleep medication for a decade. Load the revolver up with trazodone, zolpidem, eszopiclone, whatever you got. Spin the cylinder, cock the hammer and pull the trigger. Whatever comes out is just going to leave powder burns.