Truck Rest

Posts Tagged ‘bottle cap candy’

Coming to understand why my mother did what she did was a bigger turning point for me than learning how to drive. It was as important, too, or at least it seemed to serve a very similar function, where I could navigate the world. I don’t know if anyone can ever understand how depression works entirely. There are some things that have to do with brain chemistry , and those are all things that can be dealt with in concrete ways. But there are also those things that have to do with the strange chemistry that happens between people, and that’s another story altogether.

It was not the perfect place to have a revelation of this magnitude, and I doubt most people go to Atlantic City for a moment of illumination, but it happened that way for me. I woke up a little before noon, and had a little coffee before leaving the cool room where I was staying. This was going to be a short day, I remember thinking. It turned out that I’m better off not thinking.

Somewhere between roulette and video poker, I ran into my doppelganger. He was sitting at a table, holding two drinks, watching an older woman yell at a dealer. These are moments when I always get a tightness in my neck, like something springing tightly, and trying desperately not to recoil. They are always so familiar that I get the taste of childhood in my mouth again, the bottle cap candy , cola flavored.

She kept yelling and the man looked down into the drinks. He looked like he wanted those drinks, and more just like them, and that there couldn’t possibly be enough in the world to help the way he was feeling. The dealer, on the other hand, was strange. He had a soft smile on his face that never wavered, and his eyes were not tough, not like everyones’ eyes are tough on the east coast. He was looking at her, and he was listening, and he looked like he might listen all night.

Between the man with the drinks and the dealer I could see myself, and I had a choice on who I could be, and I made a good decision that day.