The mutts wanted to come along, so I let them in the backseat of the car and rolled down the windows. The autoplay on the stereo connected to my phone and started playing dark jazz; the kind of music that sounds like it's punching you in the gut while it smothers you with a pillow.
I don't remember selecting that music.
The intersection is down to one lane, but it's late and not busy. In the orange streetlights, I see a man and a woman sitting on the sidewalk and chatting, their bags scattered around them. They seem resigned but not unhappy. It's dark and I can't be sure. There is a god of pain, I think, and they must have eluded him today. I can't be sure. It's late and dark.
I remember the terror of uncertainty. I think I liked it.
I tell myself that now, but I can't be sure. Whatever it is I'm doing now feels like mimicry. A pantomime of solitude.
Moving slowly, like a shark, just fast enough to live, but not fast enough to get anywhere.
The gas station attendant is nowhere to be seen. I use the self-fill station. As I press the buttons on the keypad, it beeps at me and adds zeros and ones and zeros and ones in a repeating pattern. Some binary message, probably. But I don't know binary, so I ignore it.
My tank is full, and my car says I can now go 500 miles, if I drive conservatively. I feel a little better.
