things

things.

i hit a squirrel the other day. last week. it was suicidal. it ran under my wheels before i could stop. all i saw was a gray flash in my peripheral vision and then i felt the back wheel go bump over something. i looked back and there was a squirrel body in the road. i felt bad, but somehow not quite as bad as i thought i would feel, i guess because there really wasn't any way i could've avoided hitting it. it was my first casualty. i hit it near a graveyard, or should i say a memorial park, the kind where the gravestones are all flat panels on the ground so as not to blemish its parklike aspects, and when i drove by they were digging a grave. today they were raking the leaves into piles. i couldn't help but look for the corpse the next morning, but i didn't see it. i can only hope it was dragged away by some kind of scavenger and not that it was mortally wounded and managed to drag itself out of the road.

last night i had a bad night. sometimes i feel totally stifled by cohabitating. i feel like it really is identical to being married. it certainly feels as oppressive as i would imagine marriage might. i vacillate between being perfectly happy with things and thinking, what the hell am i doing? i don't know how people my age cope with the endless hyperanalysis. we're still just young enough that we can doubt every choice we make and we still have few enough roots planted that we can yank them up and go somewhere else. yeah, it's the quarter-life crisis, i guess. the tipping point between settling (literally and figuratively) and not. i need more peers that don't live thousands of miles away to discuss these things with.