new story, finale

Read the prior installment here...

So we went driving around for a while, and as the sense of adventure began to clash less and less comfortably with the everyday of annoying traffic and lengthening silences, I started to tell her about my counting, about how it freed me from everything that I wanted to leave behind after another day of work, how it was sort of like holding your breath when you were a kid, late at night when all you heard was a dog barking two yards down and the muffled voices of your parents from the kitchen, and you felt, you knew, that you could just keep holding your breath forever, somehow, and things would still go on as they were, because you were special, you were different, you mattered.

It was too much, way too soon, unavoidably, or unavoided at least. She had an extreme moment of clarity, and in a few seconds I went from the slightly off-kilter interesting guy to the either hopelessly damaged or potentially psychotic emotionally debilitated guy, neither of which seemed to have the same level of appeal. She took over the small talk from there on out, and when in about 10 minutes we just happened to find ourselves approaching the same bar we had left from, she manufactured a suitable excuse, and I gratefully climbed out of her car and started walking back to my place.

It took about 360 numbers for me to center that night, in the timeless noiseless muttering that has become a second nature for me now. But it came, like it always comes, and I drifted off to sleep that night to the echoes of my mother's voice and my father's laughter, in an endless merry-go-round shrinking into the infinity of distance.