Remember that time I was a model?

(Photograph: Enrique Parrilla Photography)

(listen)

Instead, I do push ups until I can no longer feel my arms, and the muscles in my mid-section are stretched so tight they feel as though they’ll burst. Lying on the cold floor of the bathroom, I stretch my arms out towards the ceiling, and watch as my hands shake, my stomach burning with a desperate hunger. I need something; cold air in my lungs, night air against my face. Something.

When it’s bad, it feels like I’ve been hit, a small fist clenching like a black hole in my gut. Sometimes I can feel it creep over me like a shadow; slow and cold under my skin, like a dark, inky molasses, squeezing out everything that is warm and good in me, leaving behind nothing I would ever want to recognise in myself.

It’s not so bad tonight.

I close my eyes, and I am somewhere else, caught up in the briefest of moments, something so minor and incomplete that I’m not sure why it sticks with me, but it does. As I open them again, I can feel myself slowly begin to evaporate, pieces of who-I’ve-been breaking off and floating towards the ceiling. I imagine the roof opening up, exposing the vastness of the night sky, and, closing my eyes again, I watch as these fragments dissipate into nothingness amidst the stars.

Tomorrow I will grow and change, but in this moment, this minor, incomplete moment, I can accept that I am just one flawed person on a whole planet of flawed people, and that’s enough for right now.

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME
Electricity flashes from the thimble-topped fingers of traveling “preacher-scientist” George Speake. From the 1940s into the ’60s, he was one in a series of men affiliated with Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute who demonstrated religious faith by demonstrating scientific principles. To create the lightning effect, Speake would stand atop an electric transformer coil. The room would darken. Then, at his command, a brief high-frequency current would travel over his skin, up from his feet and out of his fingertips. According to notes accompanying the image, Speake suffered no injury because “the high-frequency juice…is too fast to be felt.” Another reason he stayed safe was his extreme care in setting up the trick: The photo’s notes also warn that the practice was “for spectacle purposes only.”
—Margaret G. Zackowitz (taken from National Geographic, July 2010)

Photograph: Moody Bible Institute, National Geographic Stock

Better luck in 2012, guys!

1. Ending – Bike For Three
2. Hole In The Earth – Deftones
3. Hole In The Sky – Machine Head (Black Sabbath cover)
4. Survivalism – Nine Inch Nails
5. Paranoiattack – The Faint
6. Heavenly – The Dandy Warhols
7. It’s Not Over Yet – The Klaxons
8. The Last Day On Earth – Marilyn Manson
9. No Cities Left – The Dears

(Photograph: Debbie Egan-Chin)

I watched Nick wince as the torchlight passed over his face. He opened his mouth to speak, but the police officer at his window beat him to it.

“You have a headlight out.”

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I couldn’t help but notice how young the he looked. Tall, too; he had to hunch down just to look through the window of the truck. His brow furrowed and his lips pursed as he took the licence from my friend’s outstretched hand. He was nervous.

As I reached up to scratch my nose, I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. It was another cop, glaring at the two of us through the window on my side, one hand resting menacingly on his hip. He seemed older than the first officer, but not necessarily in years; he was older in experience, and it showed in his eyes.

“Y’all wait right here while I run this through the system.”

When I turned back, the second police officer was gone, vanished like he was a figment of my imagination. I looked over at Nick. He had his hands on the steering wheel, and was staring straight ahead.

“There’s a very good chance I’m going to be arrested tonight.”

His voice was calm, confident.

“… Pardon?”

“I… have a warrant out on me. There’s a chance that we may have have crossed county lines, and that everything will be okay, but, you know…”

“Ah…”

I looked down at my hands, spread out flat on my thighs since I saw the phantom officer with his hand on his holster. It took a few seconds for this new information to register.

“Wait, a warrant?! What for?”

“The same thing we were pulled over for.”

“Oh.”

He ducked his head to peer into the rearview mirror, squinting as the patrol car’s headlights met his gaze.

“They’re taking their time. That’s never a good sign. Was I eloquent?”

“Eloquent?”

“How did I sound? I didn’t sound drunk, did I? Did I sound eloquent?”

“You sounded fine, man. Actually, if the TV’s depiction of Texas police is anything to go by, you may have sounded a little too eloquent.”

My attempt at brevity fell on deaf ears, as Nick continued to focus his attention on the car behind us, not so much nervous as just plain interested in what was going on back there.

“Hmm. What’s taking them so long? It doesn’t usually take them this long. Shit.”

All of a sudden, as though something had just occurred to him, he turned and looked me square in the eye.

“Hey, I’m really sorry about this.”

“Why? What do you have to be sorry about? It was my idea to go to this stupid party tonight.”

“Yeah, but if I took that first turn off, we wouldn’t have been pulled over.”

“Maybe. But don’t forget that I was the one that wanted to leave downtown early. I was the sad bastard, bringing everyone down…”

He forced a smile, and scratched his jaw, shrugging as he turned back to the rearview mirror.

“Hh. You’re right. I guess it is your fault. Still…”

“Still nothing! I get to spend the night at a Texas police station – that’s a pretty fucking cool story to tell when I get home.”

“Trust me, it’s really not that hard… Shit. Here they come.”

He placed his hands back on the wheel as the officer returned, still examining the driver’s licence by torchlight. I glanced out my window, and sure enough, my cop was back again. His hand was no longer on his hip, but there was something about his manner that told me that he was just as ready for a shoot-out as before, perhaps even more so. Turning back to the driver’s side, I saw that the first officer had produced a small pad and a pen.

“Okay. I just need you to sign this, sir. This is not an admission of guilt, but you will need to appear in court.”

“Sure, no problem.” Nick said, as he scribbled his name down.

The officer took the pad back, and tore off three sheets, two of which he handed back to Nick with a brief explanation on what to do with each of the colour-coded copies, before telling us to drive safely and heading back to his car. When I looked at Nick, the sense of relief was almost palpable.

“Fuck.” he said as a tiny smile began to form in the corners of his mouth. “That was close. It doesn’t usually take them that long. I really thought I was going to spend the night in jail.”

He turned the key in the ignition, and as the truck roared to life, I couldn’t help but equate it with a sigh of relief, as though the engine had been holding it’s breath since we were pulled over.

“Sir…”

The police officer was back, and all the tension that I had felt dissolve in the last few minutes returned ten-fold, filling the cab with a sense of foreboding. This was happening. Nick was going to spend the night in jail, and I would have to choose between staying with the car, or loitering around a police station until the morning…

He leant in through the still open window, and handed Nick his licence.

“Y’all drive safely, now, and have a good night.”

For all my tattooed fellow travelers who are reluctant to take off their jackets when out for dinner.

Eight hours earlier, as I finally managed to drift off to sleep, the train had just pulled out of Tucson, Arizona. The man who had been seated to my left for the past nine and a half hours had reached his destination, and I was able to stretch out and hope for some decent shut-eye. By then, all you could see outside was the black of night, punctuated by the occasional flashing red and blue lights of a border patrol search; but now, in the morning, the sky was a beautiful shade of pink, that bled out of the dawn like a watermark, and stained the desert vegetation into a brilliant neon orange. Was this still Arizona? New Mexico? Was I in Texas already?

To my right, across the aisle, I saw that the man who was seated in front of me had moved in the night, and was running his best game on a cute girl in a white t-shirt that futilely tried to hide her leopard print bra, the low murmur of his voice punctuated by bold proclamations of ‘hustling’and ‘business to take care of’. As they whispered conspiratorially, an older man in an ill-fitting beige suit entered through the carriage door, and, perhaps drunk, perhaps unaccustomed to the rhythm of the train, began to unsteadily make his way through the car. He stopped abruptly when he reached my neighbors, and, in a thick southern accent, asked them if they had insurance.

“You got to respect my opinion; I been around for some time…”

He leant over towards the girl.

“Honey, would you date a man if he had no money?”

Not sure how to answer, she looked down at her hands, shaking her head from side-to-side as she bit her tongue.

“Ex-actly! Insurance! Trust me, I know what ah’m talkin’about. But I been datin’this girl fer two years now, payin’her rent, and I still ain’t seen no pussy! She calls me up the other day…”

I got up and squeezed past him, making my way to the dining car for some breakfast.

“Juarez, murder capital of the world!” intoned the server cheerfully as I walked through the door, pointing out the window on the right hand side at a few run-down looking buildings huddled beyond an ugly gray metal fence.

I missed California. I missed my friends.