Driving through the suicide part of town.
The part that we don’t talk about because it hurts too much or just enough or maybe we’ve chosen to have forgotten because it’s easier that way. The mortgage was cheap when we moved here out of the city. Everybody was doing it. Cept no one told us why.
The nice man at the bank that got us all signed and sorted only lasted another week after closing and sure drowning could have been an accident, right? Yeah, maybe.
Cross past Miller st like it’s some sort of fucking landmine waiting to be tripped, grinning that evil grin that would make a cheshire look calm and collected, and we feel that insurmountable weight in our stomachs and in our chest and in our heart and in the part of our brain that doesn’t have any choice in what it remembers and what it doesn’t, and in our feet, pushing the gas pedal a little bit harder than we should, trying to make it out alive without steering the car into oncoming traffic or an unstructurally sound building that would just come collapsing down on us if we let it.
All for cheaper gas and the grocery that sells the kind of eggs we like for the price we want to pay the next town over, pulling people past with the promise of a better life and a movie theatre with six screens and nothing like the always-present thought of a whole block of people putting guns in their mouths and running gas in the garage and jumping out the attic window with a noose around their neck in near perfect synchronicity. Would all feel so unreal if it hadn’t actually happened.
No one here now though, just us, hoping to make it past Market st where grass starts to grow again and voices speak above a whisper and we breathe in lungfuls of air again after having held it for so long.
Don’t talk about it though. We just hope that on the way back one of us remembers to take the long way home. The highway, around the suicide part of town. Sure, the traffic is worse but the feelings are better.
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KKUURRTT is like 6’9, but you wouldn’t have guess if I didn’t tell you. Food for thought. Some things are a distraction.
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image: Jesse Hilton
Rejection Letters 