#9.5: Chasing Love

[00:00:13] Ah, chasing love can drive you mad? Make you feel real good? Make you feel so sad? Oh, oh, oh, chasing love? [00:00:27] Make you act just like a fool? You can hardly speak when she smiles at you? Oh, oh, chasing love. [00:00:39] I am not on the run. [00:00:42] Not in the technical, prosecutable sense. [00:00:46] Not yet. [00:00:48] But the air tastes like it. Metallic and nervous. And my shadow clings tighter than usual, as if it knows something I don't. [00:00:56] As if it's waiting for the knock on the door or the flick of headlights across a motel curtain. [00:01:02] I can feel it, God help me, I can feel it in my bones. And the blood running too hot beneath skin gone thin from sleepless nights. [00:01:12] I've made a mistake. A grievous one. [00:01:16] And not the kind you bury under apologies or whiskey. [00:01:20] A mistake to the tune of half a million dollars. [00:01:24] Half a million. [00:01:27] Do you know what that feels like? When you were raised to believe a 20 stuffed in a birthday card was a gesture of wild generosity. [00:01:35] And it happened here. [00:01:37] Here, of all places. In Hickory Bend, in this slow, simmering, sighing, half dead patch of Carolina earth with its collapsing porches and its people who smile at you like they know what you did even when you haven't done it yet. In fucking Hickory Bend, where the heat hangs like regret and the past walks around in broad daylight wearing the faces of people you never meant to see again. A place I have tried, God is my witness, to forget, to out drive, to scrub from the soles of my boots and the grooves of my teeth and the back corners of my skull. [00:02:17] But it won't let me. It never lets me. [00:02:21] It calls me back with a voice like a hymn sung off key by someone you once loved and now fear. A place that remembers you even when you change your name. A place that waits for you to look away before slipping a hand into your pocket and reminding you what you owe. And now I'm here again. [00:02:40] Not on the lam, not quite. But close enough to smell the it.