Different Lanes

He did not want to live life in the fast lane. He did not want to languish in the slow lane, either. He was not one to compromise and settle with the middle lane. No, Richard decided to pull over altogether and have a nice long nervous breakdown.

I am going to have one, he said, when he woke up one day. He dreamt he was part of a cycad salad slowly devoured by a pink triceratops. He didn’t end up having one eventually, because he had to mow the lawn and mowing the lawn put his mind off such thoughts. Plants were more pleasant things, Richard thought, they don’t scream when their limbs are cut off.

The next day he was more sure he was going to crack. He felt like there was a seam in him that was going to come apart and all his stuffing would come out. He wasn’t exactly sure what this stuffing was, but no one likes stuffing in Richard’s family and proof of that came every time they bought roast chicken from Woolies and no one wanted to eat the miscellaneous ball of mush that occupied its innards. Even the dog didn’t want it.

He was positive on the third day. He was even physically sick. Of course, he wasn’t entirely sure it could be due to his mental state. During dinner the night before he became sympathetic for the stuffing that no one wanted to eat. Roast chicken stuffing must have feelings too, he thought, just like his did. So he ate the stuffing that no one in the family wanted to eat as a pact of solidarity, albeit a frivolous and painful one, as Richard had a gentle stomach and the gentle stomach complained oh-so gently in gentle stomach terms that roast chicken stuffing was an unpermitted digestible item in his body. So he vomited all his dinner out early the next morning and he spent the rest of the day imagining he had stomach cancer, like those soap opera characters on tv his mother loves.

Richard was not a soap opera character or a roast chicken or a pink triceratops or his soap opera-watching mother. He was simply human and wanted his stuffing acknowledged.

He forgot about it for three days. He wasn’t god but a full week had swung around and Richard realized he was back at the same day he woke up and felt like he was going to crumble to dust. The previous night he had seen a documentary with a snake in it; he dreamt of the snake. He was the snake. The skin on the snake was old and ready to be shaken off, but the snake was impatient. It wanted the skin off, right away. The other snakes all had their new skins on and no one had room for old skins. Old skins were what you kept in the cupboard and occasionally brought out to show the relatives how small you were five years ago.

So what the snake did was try to swallow itself. It seemed a stupid idea, but the snake had already tried everything to remove the old skin sort of bludgeoning itself to death. Outside became inside and inside became an outside for another inside, but old was still old and new was still new, and the snake was trapped in its own innards.

Richard cried in bed when he woke up. He wasn’t ashamed of it.