Echo Against Echo

(Out of order.)

(Out of order.)

(Dialtone.)

I think I am going to suffer tonight. Somebody hold my hand. Anyone.

A shriek of pavement in sorrow echoes through the metro. This lot is a miles wide in every direction away from me. I cower before a telephone booth drenched in dust graffiti. I flinch at threats written about them from people I don't know. I am a Chinese delivery boy. My vehicle has broken down in this concrete labyrinth. I think my boss has fired me now. I think my fiancee has left me. I am still disowned by my family, the Pacific ocean over. I am fucked in this lifetime.

All I wanted was a night drive. All I wanted was my head to rest on something besides responsiblity. 11 PM, the hour my shift begins and the hour some privleged junkie wants his box of rice. This image shifts to the box of light in front of me that has no connection to the outside world. I fear it, and it is so like me.

Boss yells at me for a while. I want to reply, but the weight of many nights like this lose me the will to instigate any form of destiny. My financee has threatened moving back to Beijing with her ex, as a secretary under her father's law firm. On more than one occasion. "What can I do, bitch?", as I take the first drag of the night on my cigarette. I don't care what the boss says anymore, and Capellas sell half price on Tuesday nights. 

I dropped out of college cause there was a hole in my heart. I saw you in the flowers and imagined you filling it, but it takes a full pocket to fill a soul these years. Fuck. And it was graduate school anyway, but this delivery job was all the establishment offered me. Fuck.

I took the car out for a joyride after the third delivery. It was 1 AM, or some shit, by then. I emptied my whole carton by then. Circles of sulphur... they burned and burned around the lot at night. I even let loose some sparks, and they looked like stars in the night. I never felt happier. Then the metal became louder. Then the delivery tank lost its war. I never felt sadder.

I pushed it just far enough to the booth I saw.. contemplating what this entails for my immediate future. I'll just call.. I can easily say I got lost to a place. The boss yells at me for making multiples of quota regardless. He'll dock my pay. My fiancee will scold me for that. But I've gotten used to not being loved. God bless America.

Then..

(Out of order.)

Out of order. Out of order.

I'm sure, miles away from my suffering here, my life is ending. I'm too stupid to end it myself, so my greatest enemies need to do that deed. The dialtone.. God that dialtone. It gets louder. It sings in harmony with the echo of the endless lot.. full of ghosts who needed this same long distance call. I imagine them getting rides from this hellhole, and back to a home with walls. I wonder if its possible to sleep standing, as I stare at the booth.

Now I do something profound.. I stop thinking. My uniform is a flag, representing not country or love, but me. It hangs on an antenna like my ancestors who died on a beach somewhere. Instead of dying on this concrete shore, I'll run goddamn it all. I'm just going to run into the blinking seas of lights. If those anonymous threats come true, let them. If I'm unemployed, I'll chance that. I won't have a woman to take care of. I won't have any of it. I won't.

I turn around before I leave for my new life. I write on in the dust, of uncut diamonds who used the booth before. "God bless you." Seconds later, you'll never know me again.