Enclosed Enlightenment
Challenge Four
Creative Writing ENGL 3516
Professor Meyer
June 22, 006
Prepared by Richard Birch
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch
It is a very strange feeling to be kidnapped. Every cell in your body becomes alive with seemingly extra-sensory perception. Every air molecule and spec of dust floating around you rubs your epidermis like scissors scratching on your skin. Every bit of light that comes through the cracks surrounding the enclosed and locked automobile trunk hatch pierces your brain like a bullet. Every sound you hear around you such as the grinding of the road below, the passing vehicles you wish you could call out to, and the voices inside the vehicle cabin behind you disturbs and nauseates your core. Feeling strange is not the same as feeling fear. Fear is immobilizing. Fear removes your capacity to feel anything else. I, for some odd reason, was not afraid of my particular situation on that bone chilling cold February afternoon. I was certainly caught up in the intense insanity of the moment that it can only be depicted as remarkable and self-assuring. Equally remarkable was that I was ready to fight.
I was completely caught by surprise walking to my car from my chiropractor’s office. I had just come from what I would call an emergency treatment appointment. I called his office not two hours before begging to be fit in for a mere ten minutes as I could barely drag my body out of bed that morning. My upper back had been on fire for three days and my next appointment with my doctor was booked for no less than two weeks from that day. My chiropractor agreed to see me as my number’s five and six vertebrae were dispersing enough pain to send the most calm, spiritual, and serene yoga instructor to drink. As I was bounced around inside the car’s cramped storage compartment, the memory of the cracking from the doctor twisting my back and the feeling of the absolute release from myself and from my corporeal dilapidation somehow soothed my nerves. I just kept thinking about bones cracking and backs twisting. In some way I found escape from another corporeal ruin in the memory of another. The arthritis in my upper back, a condition I have dealt with since I was seventeen years old has always made me a person very much associated with physical discomfort and pain. The tight enclosure and uneasiness of a car’s tiny trunk space was just another signifier of the kind of compressed stimulation my body and my mind was used to.
Damn it I wish I had caught a better look at the car as the two guys threw me into their trunk. I think it was a green car, a sedan, maybe. It had an Ontario licence plate, I remember that. But shit what was the fucking make and model? I was kind of embarrassed telling the police afterwards that I didn’t really know what kind of car I was kidnapped in. They kind of made me feel bad for that, like we’re all supposed to know a car make and model at any given moment. I’m sorry, but I had other things on my at the time. It happened with such haste and rapidity I can still hardly process any of it. But it didn’t seem to matter then. All I could feel was astonishment. I was in shock because I didn’t experience any fear. I was in shock that a fire that earlier could be located between my two shoulder blades penetrating my capacity to walk peacefully throughout my day, was now burning a hellish ferocity in my brain. I may have been in hell at that moment, but hell, like heaven, is just another place I don’t really believe in.
Somehow I knew I would get out of that predicament. I believed I would come through unscathed, with limited bruises and scars, and with no real reason to be angry or damaged in life. It felt random, and it was apparently. I still don’t quite understand why I knew that in such a demanding and stressful moment in time. I’m usually not quite so together. I’m the most stressed out and cynically neurotic person I could imagine. I am the kind of person people who work at bumper sticker and greeting card companies write one-line pieces of fucking meaningless crap for such as “Don’t stress the small stuff” and “When given lemons, make lemonade”. I don’t do bumper stickers. I do reality. I do pain. I do life.
I didn’t know what it was they wanted when I was trapped in that little dark moment in time. I didn’t know who they were or if they knew who I was. I didn’t know where I was going, or when I would see my home again. Maybe it was some instinctual force inside of me that was regulating my ability to sink or swim, eat or starve, kill or be killed. Maybe I had had enough psychotic experiences from past relationships, past jobs, past relatives that certain crises really don’t register in the same way as they do for normal people. I am a bit crazy. I am somewhat uneven in my ways. I do not always know what is going to happen to me. But on that cold day, something about me became apparent that I did have the capacity to survive anything, a capacity I have been searching for in myself for decades. My broken hand, the bruises on my face, the three-inch gash in my left knee, and the red welt on my gut indicate something went down, something that I survived, and something I still to this day have difficulty recalling. But in that car trunk on that bumpy ride, somehow, I knew as soon as those fuckers would open up the door, I was getting the hell out of that.
Creative Writing ENGL 3516
Professor Meyer
June 22, 006
Prepared by Richard Birch
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch
It is a very strange feeling to be kidnapped. Every cell in your body becomes alive with seemingly extra-sensory perception. Every air molecule and spec of dust floating around you rubs your epidermis like scissors scratching on your skin. Every bit of light that comes through the cracks surrounding the enclosed and locked automobile trunk hatch pierces your brain like a bullet. Every sound you hear around you such as the grinding of the road below, the passing vehicles you wish you could call out to, and the voices inside the vehicle cabin behind you disturbs and nauseates your core. Feeling strange is not the same as feeling fear. Fear is immobilizing. Fear removes your capacity to feel anything else. I, for some odd reason, was not afraid of my particular situation on that bone chilling cold February afternoon. I was certainly caught up in the intense insanity of the moment that it can only be depicted as remarkable and self-assuring. Equally remarkable was that I was ready to fight.
I was completely caught by surprise walking to my car from my chiropractor’s office. I had just come from what I would call an emergency treatment appointment. I called his office not two hours before begging to be fit in for a mere ten minutes as I could barely drag my body out of bed that morning. My upper back had been on fire for three days and my next appointment with my doctor was booked for no less than two weeks from that day. My chiropractor agreed to see me as my number’s five and six vertebrae were dispersing enough pain to send the most calm, spiritual, and serene yoga instructor to drink. As I was bounced around inside the car’s cramped storage compartment, the memory of the cracking from the doctor twisting my back and the feeling of the absolute release from myself and from my corporeal dilapidation somehow soothed my nerves. I just kept thinking about bones cracking and backs twisting. In some way I found escape from another corporeal ruin in the memory of another. The arthritis in my upper back, a condition I have dealt with since I was seventeen years old has always made me a person very much associated with physical discomfort and pain. The tight enclosure and uneasiness of a car’s tiny trunk space was just another signifier of the kind of compressed stimulation my body and my mind was used to.
Damn it I wish I had caught a better look at the car as the two guys threw me into their trunk. I think it was a green car, a sedan, maybe. It had an Ontario licence plate, I remember that. But shit what was the fucking make and model? I was kind of embarrassed telling the police afterwards that I didn’t really know what kind of car I was kidnapped in. They kind of made me feel bad for that, like we’re all supposed to know a car make and model at any given moment. I’m sorry, but I had other things on my at the time. It happened with such haste and rapidity I can still hardly process any of it. But it didn’t seem to matter then. All I could feel was astonishment. I was in shock because I didn’t experience any fear. I was in shock that a fire that earlier could be located between my two shoulder blades penetrating my capacity to walk peacefully throughout my day, was now burning a hellish ferocity in my brain. I may have been in hell at that moment, but hell, like heaven, is just another place I don’t really believe in.
Somehow I knew I would get out of that predicament. I believed I would come through unscathed, with limited bruises and scars, and with no real reason to be angry or damaged in life. It felt random, and it was apparently. I still don’t quite understand why I knew that in such a demanding and stressful moment in time. I’m usually not quite so together. I’m the most stressed out and cynically neurotic person I could imagine. I am the kind of person people who work at bumper sticker and greeting card companies write one-line pieces of fucking meaningless crap for such as “Don’t stress the small stuff” and “When given lemons, make lemonade”. I don’t do bumper stickers. I do reality. I do pain. I do life.
I didn’t know what it was they wanted when I was trapped in that little dark moment in time. I didn’t know who they were or if they knew who I was. I didn’t know where I was going, or when I would see my home again. Maybe it was some instinctual force inside of me that was regulating my ability to sink or swim, eat or starve, kill or be killed. Maybe I had had enough psychotic experiences from past relationships, past jobs, past relatives that certain crises really don’t register in the same way as they do for normal people. I am a bit crazy. I am somewhat uneven in my ways. I do not always know what is going to happen to me. But on that cold day, something about me became apparent that I did have the capacity to survive anything, a capacity I have been searching for in myself for decades. My broken hand, the bruises on my face, the three-inch gash in my left knee, and the red welt on my gut indicate something went down, something that I survived, and something I still to this day have difficulty recalling. But in that car trunk on that bumpy ride, somehow, I knew as soon as those fuckers would open up the door, I was getting the hell out of that.
posted by energetika at 11:55 PM
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