The thought of sitting still in place unfurled my anxiety on a regular day, but in this new mindspace where I couldn’t stand myself, it made the rapid-fire synapsis of dysphoria nearly deafening. I did not know if I could fix it. I wasn’t totally sure I could be cool with myself. I simply knew I had to try and as the humidity and temperature stacked upon itself to mimic my own instability, I wedged myself between the tank and luggage tower, thanking Science I hadn’t eaten all the tacos I wanted in the last few weeks. I started the engine and with an unsteady wobble down our drive, made the turn to leave.

I had been shitty with myself for a long time. Somewhere along the way in the last decade I was able to convince myself that I was the absolute worst and that other people’s opinions of me, my skills, and my inherent aloofness were more important than anything else. Maybe this was something that happened once you hit your early thirties, but I remembered many of my close friends exclaiming how they loved their thirties because they had stopped caring about so much.

I had married early at a naive twenty-two years old to a man ten years my senior, and while I’ll never believe age truly had anything to do with it, it was akin to marrying a boring old man. He was the type that played board games that I didn’t understand (and would chew me out when I moved a piece wrong) and then called him and his friends insane, as if playing these board games while drinking tequila was life on the actual edge. His friends, like his family, never warmed to me. I never warmed to them. They did not create. They did not let their souls shoot across the sky like starry spiderwebs of passion. They spoke in domestics, while I spoke in metaphors. It’s said in the history of Us that I alienated them out of his life. And while that may be somewhat accurate from that perspective, I really just didn’t hang out with them when they came by, simply because I didn’t understand them at all. We were not of the same stars.

I was tied for eight years to the Evil Maharajah and his regime of control. I was forced to stop smoking cigarettes before I even moved in with him from out of state and if I brought up the nervous tick quitting had left me with I would be reprimanded. I was paid off to not speak of such pathetic things with toys and fancy dresses. I hadn’t played a lick of music in years, but like clockwork with a better groove, it started seeping back into my life. I made friends in a town of strangers I had been in for years; the wrong kind of friends, who did the alcohols, and smoked the gigglebush, and occasionally tripped balls on snacks of fungus. I fronted a band and surrounded myself with rad people and my confidence grew. I was powerful. I was maybe even sexy. I sang and played fiercely, leaving actual blood on the stage and in the depths of my Hammond organ knock-off. I would come home at all hours of the night feeling liberated to a dark house designed for me to trip in, my overseer already asleep, realizing that as I blinked through my twenties, I had outgrown my dad husband. In fairness, my dad would smoke the gigglebush with me though, so dad husband is not a fair comparison. My dad was infinitely cooler than my ex-husband.

My marriage did everything it could to break me at the knees and feel incompetent. The Evil Maharajah set up as many chains as possible to make sure I couldn’t be on my own. I was financially dependent in every way and even though I had broken away from him years ago, I had all this damage to reconcile. Likewise, by breaking away, I had put myself in a town where I had one friend. All my musician friends stayed in Nashville or moved further away. All my childhood friends — my kindred spirits — were nearly a thousand miles away. My band’s lives grew and we found it harder and harder to get together and shed the blood onto the stage, ripping open our souls and letting all the daily garbage out. I was repressed to begin with but now I was also internalized. When I looked in the mirror I no longer saw the rock star, even though I was playing for huge crowds with my current production compared to the bar lights Absinthe Junk played to. I was small and now just a mechanism of the great stage machine. Marriage and work had chipped away so many pieces that I only saw this fragment of a human. I found similar star stuff in Nick, and he had slowly reformed pieces of me and sewn together cracks in my mind. Yet, when I looked in the mirror a few years later I saw this broken person; this lonely person who had one friend in one hundred miles. Dysphoria had trained me to huff “Piece of shit.” or “Fat loser.” at the mirror no matter how many times a day Nick told me I was beautiful. I knew he was on the train to giving up, as the days became less and less interspersed with these proclamations, by no fault of his own, of course. Who in their right mind would keep saying the same things to brick wall?

My neurosis had long since dwarfed my confidence and now it was everyday, me saying to something, “I can’t do it.” I had become scared of everything ordinary. Grocery stores were a panic attack. Calling someone on the phone made me cry internally. Passing the last of my classes in my undergraduate were a constant fear of defeat. I was functioning less and less thanks to stress and being simply a broken person. Finally, I called bullshit.

I turned down one of the main arteries of West Huntsville. It was a street I took often to get to and from the university and for work, filled with your every American need of a Walmart, catty corner gas stations (one usually having just been robbed), and a school in constant state of being constructed. Soon I would be on the interstate for a short stint before retiring to the back roads of west Alabama, where I would have to depend on my memory and maps to get me to Mississippi, because this was a real American road trip, so fuck GPS. I would have to rely on myself, as having phone service or even other humans in sight on these roads was questionable.

The winds whipped furiously around me as the motorbike pummeled loudly down the interstate. Only on a motorcycle can you go from being so hot you’re sure you’re going to die to chilled in under a minute. The Huntsville traffic sped by with crazed intent, something that phased me very little on the motorcycle anymore. While you’re generally invisible on a bike, focusing so hard on the hive of everything going on around you brought about diminishing return. Much like the peace I wanted to get into in my regular life, on the bike you worried about what you could control and getting out of the way of whatever it was you couldn’t. There wasn’t much use in worrying about the latter until it happened. It seemed like a simple concept: worry about what you can control in the here and now, nothing else. It was a simple concept on the bike and if my mind could go there while the wind was on my face, what was stopping it from doing it when the wind wasn’t?

“End controlled access.” the highway shouted in all caps.

I had left the interstate and was heading into waters barely charted, with three states to cross in a day to make my coveted reservations in Utah. The sun was falling and the towering cumulus observed in Huntsville was thicker and more organized here.