Leaving Sacramento

I don't remember exactly how or when I first discovered it. Strangely, I can't give you a date or a time. One day I just felt like I had done the same thing all over again. Deja Vu. And more and more so it kept happening. It was small at first, falling in the category of speech and movements, but afterwards it just seemed to spike.

That sick feeling of repeating something or being somewhere but you aren't really sure you have been. Trying to desperately remember when or where you had seen the same thing or if you heard it on the radio, convincing yourself that you arent going mad. Only it wasn't just me, there was a clerk at the front desk of that decrepid motel I was staying at who swore to me that I had just come last night to check out.

Exhasperatedly, she said I walked in and I told her to check me out of the hotel and send a bottle of rum to the room. I was livid, who the hell was this woman to tell me I had done something I had no memory of. My face was on fire and my fists balled into solid stone. I felt like smacking her. I realized how upset I was getting and it threw me off, I have never had a temper before.
That's when she showed me the security tape. Those closed caption ones that time lapse every second or two. And shit if it was clear, but in that split time video on the screen in front of me, I saw me, walk up to her and stand right in full view of the camera.

What the fuck was going on here? I starred at the man in the video wearing my jacket, wearing my boots and my torn up work jeans. And then I watched in horror as the man in the video wearing my face, stopped and looked directly at the camera and mouthed my name.
I yelled at the clerk to turn it off and stop fucking with me!! I was terrified and she was at my mercy. I screamed obscenities at her as I left the lobby in a maddened clamor, knocking things out of my way, delirious and trying to understand what the hell was happening.

Was I drunk? I must have been, I have had far too many beers in the last couple of days. But even in my drunken state I never have done so many conscious things while havng no cognitive memory of some sort afterwards.

I walked to where I had parked my car the night before, I was done, I was leaving Sacramento, fuck this, too much city, It's probably getting to me. I froze in a heat and a wave of pure anger as every sensible bone in my body exploded into fury and hate as I stood agaze of the giant hole in my car window. What the fuck?!?!

Yelling and cursing like a mad man I climbed onto the seat and brushed the shards of glass off the dahsboard, cutting my palm deeply in my haste to get into the car. I was so infurriated that I didnt stop to ask what had happened to and why the clerk had videos of me but not of some jerk off wrecking my car. Nothing seemed important, except for leaving the streets of this repetive hell. Even the track homes that surrounded the ciy were all the same.

I didnt even care for the two inch gash leaking on my lap and on my steering wheel. Blood everywhere but I didnt care, I was leaving. I didn't check the mirrors, I didn't connect the seat belt and I didnt even use my signals while I turned. I was getting the fuck outta Dodge.
Sacramento was a blur through the giant man sized breach in my windshield but I didnt care as I burst through red lights and stop signs. I didn't care when I went onto a one way street and clipped a car as I sped past. I didn't care as I tore the rear bumper off my car as the steel chasis ripped like paper on the concrete median of the road. I jumped on the freeway as the high rise buildings of downtown grew smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror.

Going over the speed limit by 50 miles shot a deafening flood of wind through the glass window and spun the interior of the little car into a frenzy of paper, glass and blood. I'll stop when I can't see the city anymore. I'll fix my hand then but only then. I'll be safe when I'm back at home. I'll be free when I can see the ocean, when I can smell the smog of Los Angeles and the traffic of the 57 freeway. I'll figure all this out when I'm far far away from Sacramento.

Speeding at over 100 miles an hour oblivious to my surroundings and what side of he road I was on, I smacked head long into a UHAUL pickup truck headed the wrong way. And as I sailed perfectly through the man sized hole of my front windshield, I couldn't help but feel like I had done this before....