Chapter 18

      As he left Memphis, he felt a slight pang of regret. He had made a real human connection there, and found that rather surprising given his current emotional state. He knew people needed other people, even when, and perhaps especially when, they were at their worst. Still it wouldn’t have been something he would have predicted for himself. 

     As he crossed the Tennessee state line, the song “Tangled up in Blue” by Bob Dylan came on, and he took it as a kind of a sign. He had loved the song since he was a teenager, and for a moment stopped to consider why that was. It was a rambling, confusing song, but at its core seemed to be about a man searching for a lost love of his. As a kid he had always wondered if he would ever love someone like that, and now, years later, he had his answer. The difference was he couldn’t find his missing girl no matter how hard he looked. All he could do was chase memories of her.

       He turned up the song as it came to an end, fixating on the last verse and thinking again about the parallels to his own life, he listened to Dylan sing’

 “So now I'm going back again
I got to get her somehow
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter's wives
Don't know how it all got started
I don't what they're doing with their lives
But me I'm still on the road
Heading for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in Blue.

          It described exactly how he felt right now. Completely jumbled up in a sea of melancholia while also searching for something elusive. Oddly, it wasn’t the worst feeling in the world.

     He took a look at his map, and suddenly felt a strange compulsion to reach Amarillo Texas on the next journey of his trip. He remembered stopping there when he was in his early twenties on a long trip home to the state of Washington from New Orleans. He was running out of money after visiting an old flame down there, and saw advertisements for the “Big Texan,” a 72 ounce steak that they served in a restaurant in Amarillo if you could finish the entire steak in an hour. He was sure at the time he could do it, and he was wrong. The steak ended up costing him like 75 bucks, which left him coasting in on fumes by the time he finally made it back home.

     He laughed at the memory, while also remembering that it was the pursuit of then loss of a woman that had sent him on that excursion as well. Once again he was repeating a familiar pattern, and he thought again about the larger implications. Perhaps he was a modern version of Sisyphus, doomed to push a rock up a hill for the rest of his life, only to have it continually fall back down to the bottom.

     He spent most of the afternoon driving through the state of Oklahoma, where it seemed he went hours without seeing another human being. He found himself thinking about one of the last clients he had seen before the accident, and how he had described a fear of “disappearing” when he went days at a time without human interaction. John had been oddly touched by the revelation, and now, for the first time, he truly got a sense of what the man had meant. He pinched his skin and looked in the rear view mirror, trying to get some proof that he himself wasn't disappearing.