But...

But it wasn’t good. Or at least, it didn’t stay good.

I initially thought it would be best to leave what I posted last night.

To leave the story there seemed really important - like I’d begun to prove my point, like breaking the rules was starting to take charge, like I was starting to pave my way out of the game.

But I woke up this morning, and the fears that hit me last night after I got home haven’t left, but they have made me think a little more about what exactly I’m trying to achieve here - with this blog, with this experiment.

The me that left the car broken and bruised last night, the me that the jogger feared, didn’t hang around for very long.

On the way driving home I looked down and realised I was bleeding from my elbow.

Only small cuts, but enough of them that a reasonable amount of blood had soaked into my shirt sleeve.

I started to feel a deep churning in my stomach, and my head started to hurt, numbly disconnected from my body, my hands seeming far away from the steering wheel.

I turned off the freeway at my exit, pulling the car over almost immediately. I vomited a thin pile of bile into the gutter, the strings hanging out from my nose, me coughing and breathing in too sharply.

I spat into the gutter and wiped my nose on my shirt sleeve. I figured it was already bloody, a bit of bile wouldn’t make much more damage.

As I pulled into my driveway, my thoughts felt distant. My breathing sounded distant, like a churning mill and what little of sense I could string together in the back of my mind buzzed in and out like a slightly out of tune radio.

I made my way into the house, and I had a big, fatty meal of sausages and potatoes, something I’d never usually eat - something solid and palpable that would sit heavy in my stomach and ground me, at least a little.

And it worked, for the most part. But those buzzing, static-hazed, vague blowflies of thoughts didn’t fly back to my head so eagerly as I would have hoped. I couldn’t hold onto anything solid in my head.

It was like I’d busted a part of me, smashed the floor out from under my self as I walked along it.

I’ve never broken a law - short of stealing lollies from the now-defunct Target choose-your-own lolly section. That and a few tickets for fare-evasion on the train.
Those acts were not as big, as intentional - not as willingly counter to all the logic I’ve been brought up to respect and follow.

I suppose I was foolish to believe it would be so easy to break out of the pattern. Habits - logical, arbitrary or not, are hard to break. Especially if that pattern, that habit, you are tying to break is the very system your brain has become accustomed to thinking in.

This feeling is natural, I’m sure, and if nothing else may simply be the flip-side of the adrenalin of last night’s excitement - my muscles and nerves catching up on some rest. It won’t deter me from the journey I’ve started, and I’m completely aware that the dogs of fear will likely nip at my heels the entire way.

But at the moment I feel a bit like a stylus skipping either side of the groove in the record.

And I’m haunted by the dreams that came to me last night when I finally fell into sleep - dreams of being locked outside of the house, of being too far away from the city to ever get back, of drifting in a world of soft, long curves with no straight edges and no surface I could grip onto.

And all the time there was a distant, familiar song that hummed just out of recognition, at the edge of my mind.