Memoirs of a Separated Man

The following is the first chapter in my "book"


Enjoy



chapter one




Saab Story


I don’t like Saabs. They claim to be born from jets, but in this one something died.
In a fire engine red Saab my wife said something that has changed my life forever;
She loved me, but she was just no longer sure that she was in love with me.
It was out of nowhere, it was apropos of nothing whatsoever, it just came out.
I was coldcocked.

I had to respond to her, now, here in this car. But how? I asked her if there is a couple out there still hungry for each other after two children, a superabundance of minutia and rote sex? If there is, it is not here, in this overpriced foreign sedan, once hailed as a victory of engineering and safety, which perhaps it once was, but appears to me now to be cheap and riddled with trickery. The exoskeleton seems paper thin. I’m utterly trapped, driving this golden chariot, but not gold, red, and not wood and iron, but plastic and rubber, with my just a moment ago wife sitting next to me, in her leather “death” seat, telling me in this piece of shit this piece of news; I’m not her man.
O.K. Keep it on the road champ. While my blood turns to the white part of fire, and at the same it time freezes as if packed in dry ice like an urgent organ being shuttled feverishly to God knows where, my earthly body leaves this world for a second.
Because it sure as shit can’t stay here.
I desperately start to search to deny that this is reality, and I start gulping for air, fed through a system of plastic hoses and vents winding their way through the frugal infrastructure. I taste metal in my mouth, what is that? For some reason I have become a caught fish, flapping on the dock, but it’s not a dock, it’s a red combustion engine transport machine. Either way I’m toast.
I would ask you now to allow me to compare myself to a caught fish;
It turns out there was a hook buried in the bait. And now I’m out of my element. My bulging lidless eyes are searching for what will never come again; the illusion of comfort.
I always thought the water would be there. Water, representing the comfort, the illusion of comfort that comes from a long term marriage. I thought it might flow in and out of me and honor our pact for as long as we lived, isn’t that in the contract? But it’s gone, the water, the promise, and yet right there, I can still smell it. And after a while as I begin to die for the lack of sustenance that I thought it provided. I start to hate it, its proximity, its cruel taunt…….its allure.
Now it mocks me, the water/commitment, because it could never have sustained me forever, or at all.
I am keeping this red Saab on the road as best I can, because the road looks like it’s a cartoon to me, it’s heaving and undulating. The tar unhitched from the earth it was poured upon.
I’m trying to ignore a low pitched bottomless inhuman frequency, I start to wonder, as I become the Pollock, the caught, the catch of the day apparently getting thrown back, I have a thought as I am being flung overboard in the throes of death;
Wait.
What if I’m not a fish?
Then I’m not really dead.