I drive barefoot, I always have. I like to feel the pedals against my skin, I can feel the power. It's erotic, it feels like control. You told me it was illegal and wreckless and that I looked a fool walking to the shop with no shoes. I said I didn't care, they were my feet, just doing what they were made to do. I look down at them, painted squares of glossy pink, a pretty toe ring on each foot a delicate chain around my ankle. However much you insist, I keep my feet bare.
I am speeding, you always complain I drive too fast, a kitchen drawer rammed with ticket receipts backs up your claim. I say there isn't enough time in the day to do things, you say I am a danger. I can never do anything right in your eyes. The surrounding countryside is a blur. Like a painting someone tipped water over, outlines fade into the background. The sun has nearly risen, it lights up a whitewashed cottage in the distance like butter spread on a slice of warm toast. The rays filter through the windscreen, the visor is useless to me, my petite frame is drowned by this car, so I squint at the road ahead. I don't know where I am going.
It's quiet but for the roar of the engine. I stopped a while back, just before day break, to listen to the blackbirds sing. I wanted a smoke too but my last packet was empty. Instead I closed my eyes and listened to the chorus of chirps. I watched as they began to flock in the orange and gold sky, a feathered dance amongst clouds and currents, tooing-and-froing, making sudden crowds and dispersing again without any seeming reason. I can't recall the last time I was this alone, doing something entirely for myself for no other reason other than it's what I felt like doing. It's not been this way for so long, since I was a child, perhaps. I have felt empty for so long. I am missing something but I don't know what. People have chipped away at me until there is nothing left for myself, so I am running away with the last piece of me. It's like I am starting from scratch, being reborn. I have seen daybreak a thousand times before but this time it felt like new.
Pressing down on the accelerator, the landscape is smeared, like driving through my past, no clear definitions just an endless passing of objects, events and time, lives running and falling into lives, not really living just existing. The grey concrete rushes by underneath me as the needle strains to hit three figures and yet I feel I am going nowhere, I am stood still and the hunger inside me to be something, somewhere, overwhelmes me. As my speed increases my breathing becomes rapid, shallow, my heart beats faster, I feel it pound against my ribcage. I want to feel alive again.
Glancing up ahead I see a creature in the road and I have a split second to make a decision, on my own and without discussion or debate for the first time in years. Being alone feels good. I swerve erratically, the car jolts to the side, the force throwing me against the door. The wheels decide a path of their own as the car rockets through long grass and past shrubs and trees, branches scratch the metal and shatter glass, snapping, uprooted from the ground. It feels like flying and for a long time I am helpless. I hear myself scream.
As the car slams to a sudden halt I am aware of pain but where I don't know. I see nothing but a kaleidoscope of lights, like when I would look up a the sun as a child and the sun would burn my eyes sending shapes of solid silver and white across my field of vison. I feel the way I'd feel when, as a kid, I would stretch out my arms and spin around and around until giddy and weak, gravity would finally pull me down into a heap on the floor, my eyes still rolling in their sockets. I can't hear anything anymore but these thoughts and colours begin to hurt my eyes and my head aches. I feel limp and almost numb and as I succumb to the feeling of letting go. I feel lighter than I have in years, I feel like a child again, the sun on my face and without a care in the world and finally I am free.
rating: 16
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