Supermarket - Bobby Hall Page 0,11
back into the booth. I tried again, slowly rising from my table. I put on my coat and walked out of the diner. I jumped in my car and sped off. I looked in my rearview mirror. My face was tangled with emotion. Tears poured out. As I drove, I couldn’t get an image out of my head: my car hydroplaning on the tears that fell from my face and flooded the streets, veering across lanes, and crashing into the back of a garbage truck. Not wearing a seat belt, I smashed through the windshield, shattering glass and landing twisted in the back of the empty truck. Then the compactor turned on, easily crushing my body into red paste.
As the macabre daydream ended, my car sputtered out. I pushed the accelerator, but nothing happened. Out of gas on the edge of town. I pulled over to the side of the road just under a bridge. This was truly nowhere. I opened the door, left the keys in the ignition, and ran.
I ran and ran, not knowing why. I sprinted with what felt like an empty body, head tilted toward the blue sky. My throat burned. Then my lungs. Then my legs. My whole body felt as if it were on fire. I suppose I ran because I wanted to feel something, anything. The blocks turned into miles, and the minutes into hours. My sprint turned to a wobbly jog. I stumbled off the street, collapsing into someone’s front yard. I had no idea where I was. I lay there, my face pillowed by blades of grass, staring into the dirt. My mind empty. My lips salty from snot and dried tears. I pushed myself up and knocked on the stranger’s front door.
“Hello, I’m sorry; may I use your phone?”
I called my mother to pick me up.
“What the fuck, Flynn? What happened?” my mom said when she arrived.
I sat quietly in her car, motionless, my head erupting with a fever.
“See, Flynn, this is what happens when you go running in the winter! Who the hell does something like this?” she said in a judgmental yet loving way. She continued to lecture, but the words began to fade, like hearing music from the outside of a nightclub, muffled and dark.
“Lola broke up with me,” I said.
“Oh, Flynn, no, I’m so sorry,” she replied.
My mind snapped back to reality and I finally thought about what had just happened.
That’s when it hit me.
Everything Lola had said was true.
She’d always told me I worked too much, that all I cared about was work, but since I never finished my work it was in vain. She even tried to justify my actions, saying that if I had ignored her for a cause, if I had put our love aside for something greater than myself, it would be one thing—but I was living in a loop. My creative pursuits were all I had that brought me any joy, and I became fanatically devoted to my craft. It was my way of feeling complete. I would hole myself up for days on end. Wake up, coffee, cereal, write, lunch, write, dinner, write, sleep. Manuscripts piled up, littering my room. I would write, stream of consciousness, uninterrupted for hours, ignoring the world outside. It was a kind of mania. If I wasn’t writing I was lost and depressed. I would talk out loud to my fictional characters, figuring out dialogue. She believed that I was detaching myself from the real world through my stories. That I was spending more time with my characters than with her. She’d go on to say that the stories I wrote never ended, and because of this it would never stop. She said every story needs an end, and that if there is no The End, then you cannot begin the next chapter.
That’s why I’m so determined to finish my novel this time. That’s why it’s going to be my best work. That’s why I’m so damn happy to have met Frank, the perfect candidate to base my protagonist on. If I can’t finish this, it’s game over. I’m finally feeling ready. Inspired. Ambitious. Focused.
Before we get to that, let me explain the dark months that followed the breakup.
The night of the breakup, after my mom brought me home, I lay in bed burning up, experiencing fever dreams and bizarre hallucinations: phantom visions of Lola next to me, caressing my hair, then evaporating.
My mother would periodically check in to make sure my fever wasn’t