A Monologue

Whenever I get out of a house and into the car I like to put my hand out of the window. Feeling the wind brush between your fingers and against your palm almost makes you believe you can actually grab that freedom, that cold, bitter air that fills your lungs and makes your heart stop. A painful, perfect freedom.

From the start we were meant to live like this, like ghosts. And like ghosts, we wander. Our home is whatever coat we wear that day, the back seat of the old car that will never look the same anymore, the 24-hour diner we happen to find open on our way to yet another barren land where we won’t stay for long. To many of you this might seem like freedom, to us, it’s an everyday prison.

I’ve thought about death. How liberating it must be, not being imprisoned in your own body anymore, even if it does end there, even if there is nothing beyond our physical self. Maybe if I died I’d have a home; maybe if I died at least I would be sleeping forever under some kind of roof, until I finally withered away. Right now, I am slowly decomposing, I am a shadow of the human I was born as. There is nothing to me but bags in the trunk of a car, two books hidden in a seat back pocket and a pair of dark eyes that have long lost their shine.

I have secrets. The three of us have secrets. They keep us going, help us breathe, help us eat. They wash our backs in the public showers and tuck us into hostel beds at night. We live off our secrets, we feed on them to stay sharp. Most of them we can never share with anyone outside our group, some of them we can never share with each other. A few of them we can’t even admit them to ourselves. But everyone is like this, not just us. Living, breathing people are full of secrets - poisonous, like parasites. But the living are fed on by their secrets. Ghosts, like us, feed off them. Eventually, they will be hollow, and we will be out of things to hide.

What then? What will be left then?

An empty car, a worn coat, second-hand gloves and two books hidden in a seat back pocket. This is all there is to us. It’s all there will be once we run of out secrets, of virgin roads, abandoned houses, cheap hostels and outdated maps. And you probably wonder why I’m being so mysterious… this is a diary, after all. But I can’t even know what I’m hiding, so you can’t either. I lie to myself. We all do. You do too.

But if I could just grab that freedom that brushes past my fingers and against my palm when I put my hand out the car window… Maybe if I could grab it, things would change.

This image of freedom would be over, and I would be free.