it is easy to merge on freeways when you are the only one

Driving down the motorway and you’ve already been awake for fifteen hours but you wont go to sleep for another twenty-five. You’ve been spending all day expelling all the energy from your brain on your own; in a room with a view. You’ve just filled up with petrol and slipped over from the ice as you run back to your car. You go inside the service station and gamble all your change on a poker machine, then you look at the food but KFC is shut so you just drink a can of Relentless as quickly as possible. In the toilet you are putting on a second pair of jeans to go with your t-shirt, long sleeved shirt, pullover jumper, zip up hoody and normal hoody. As you do this, a man comes in and looks at you accusingly; you are also carrying around your sleeping bag because-. The man thinks you are homeless and offers you a lift. You decline.

Back in your car and the heating is broken and the stereo light keeps flickering on and off, its only a minor distraction until the volume starts to fluctuate between deafeningly loud and quiet as fuck. Because your car heating is bust, your hands start to freeze over, circulation is sparse and coordination is impaired. Outside of the car is fog. You are unimpressed by six consecutive warning lights merely saying “FOG” – you are aware of the fog. You cannot see out of the windscreen so you lean over as close to the glass as you can, a back-spasm develops. You can just about make out the closest two cats-eyes in the middle of the road, and you follow them; this is your navigation system. Once the caffeine from the Relentless has worn off, your eyes begin to lose focus; you go almost cross-eyed as if you were trying to solve one of those 3-D optical illusions. Three hours happen.

You stop at another service station and eat an undercooked meatball panini. You see a flock of elderly people sat in the restaurant and it confuses you. Its not because its five AM in the morning that confuses you and its not even that they are at a service station in the middle of nowhere for a social chit-chat, but you are deeply disturbed by the sterility of their tables; none of them have ordered any food or drink whatsoever. You have trouble communicating with them, your words do not come out so you anxiously peer over your shoulder and drink another can of Relentless. A man tells you that it is minus seventeen degrees outside, but that just seems ridiculous.

Never, has a person regretted

Back on the road, you put Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation on and jump around, shaking viciously. Jacked-up on caffeine you think you are part of a budget chase film, but you are the only car on the road. Life and death are only an arm-jerk away from each other. You feel compelled to take control of your life.

As you drift from; motorway to roundabout to side road to bridge to bus stop to town center to pedestrian crossing to residential estate to petrol station to traffic light to railway crossing to driveway to bed; you are still physically awake.