M I R A G E
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Autumn 1934 Cappy Love Hanson
2016 Creative Writing Celebration: Memoir, 1st Place I’m still sitting behind the wheel of my fifteen-year-old Plymouth Barracuda fastback when the sodium lights come on in the parking lot, turning the blue hood a shade my family refers to as sickety green. My therapist has long since come out of the tinted-glass-windowed building — itself now turned a Halloween hue of blackish yellow by the lights — has gotten in his late-model Volvo, and left. In fact, most of the cars that filled the lot when I came out at five o’clock are gone. As I stare out the windshield mottled with salt from the nearby southern California beaches, a janitorial service company van pulls into one of the reserved front-row spaces. It’s gotten that late. This is what happens when I’ve had one of those sessions that ends with Dr. John saying, “It’ll be interesting to see how you handle this.” The way I’m handling it right now is by not trusting myself to negotiate the boulevard, the onramp, the freeway, the offramp, another boulevard, a grid of smaller streets, and finally the parking lot at my large, anonymous apartment complex. Because oblivion — by accidentally-on-purpose changing lanes without looking, running a red light, or turning in front of an eighteen wheeler — is a little too tempting. Oblivion, if I examine it closely enough, doesn’t mean physical destruction so much as it means an end to feeling the despair and hopelessness that sometimes result from my sessions. Dr. John and I have had the talk about the permanent solution to the temporary problem, and I’ve promised not to go there. And promised not to break my promise. I don’t numb out with drugs, booze doesn’t agree with me, and the chocolate and sugar that used to produce euphoria now knock me out of balance and into depression. An imperfect but useful form of oblivion — the one I’m choosing to indulge in tonight — consists of imagining how I might not have come to be at all, ergo would not exist, therefore would not have to feel. 54
