Let Go
March 15th, 2024
My fingers are locked tight around the steering wheel. I imagine all the ways this could go wrong at any moment, the reheated leftovers of PTSD, driving a formally stolen car that tried to kill me last year. I wonder if I can get fast enough that my car could lift up from the front and flip me over backwards; every gust of wind has me convinced that I am on black ice in the middle of the warmest spring we have ever experienced.
I remember my hands. I loosen my grip on the wheel.
The warm spring reminds me of our planet's end; not imagined, but imminent. I think about the destruction of land, a thing we do not and can never own, and the destruction of bodies, a thing borrowed for a brief time as our own but claimed too often by others with no right. For breakfast I choke down the things the world says I need and I try to sneak in a bite of something that makes my soul do that happy food dance. My mind is a minefield and my heart treats it like a dancefloor. I get mesmerized and then paralyzed by hopelessness, which manifests in my body as control, the futile attempts to hold on tighter, trying to treat the water of life like it is ice I can sculpt.
I remember my hands. I loosen my grip on the wheel.
The hopelessness is like another gust of wind but more like a fart, a disgusting smell that I can get rid of by simply rolling down my window and letting in the cold, seasonally-agnostic breeze. The green air freshener doesn't work. I don't need to remind myself that I am out of control, but I do need to remember that my particles are here, at this exact moment in time and space, because of what those same particles did at the beginning of the universe. And you can call it god or physics or something fucking else, but we have never been in control, we will not find control today, and tomorrow will offer us no more control. Our atoms will keep moving in the direction that our entire history has set, and the only way to ride this is like a rollercoaster. Free will is a mystery and so is death. I will only die one way and I hope I don't learn it for a long time.
I remember my hands. I loosen my grip on the wheel.
I can feel them in the air as I whisper to the universe: "Look, ma. No hands."