What I remember is the cockroaches and how no one ever told me they could fly.

I was trying to brush a big bastard off the wall with my shoe. I mean my fist was in the shoe and the shoe was acting as a clumsy glove.

The idea was I’d brush it onto the floor and scoop it with the dustpan, chuck it outside with his horrible friends. Because I’m not a killer. I actually get very sentimental and doe-eyed about all of God’s creatures. Not that I’m one of those freaks that actually enjoys tarantulas or the like crawling all over them. Compassion, like everything, has limits.

Then it came for me. Think chopper blades flattening a paddy field. I can tell you, wings sound big when they’re in kissing distance.

I went down of course. In a situation like that your lizard brain or monkey brain or whatever it is just takes over. You’re not you anymore, in that moment. You’re back on the savanna 100,000 years prior cutting out a short and brutal existence one breath to the next.

I remember looking up at the air conditioner above the screen door. Looking at my friend’s $200 bicycle he’d bought the week before on a whim. The next week he booked his flight home.

“I don’t know what I’m doing out here” he said.

To which I said nothing.

I remember my cheek made a sucking noise as I peeled up from the linoleum. Through the screen door from the darkness of the parking lot a little boy was watching me with a bottle in his mouth wearing nothing but a sagging diaper. I wrote a poem about that scene eight years ago.

And here I am, a completely different person, writing this.