One's Company

by Ashley Hutson

Other people can ruin a dream just by knowing it.

People who research anything, who deep-dive anything, understand that solitude is never loneliness when you have your subject. The subject looms before you like a bright city on the horizon, beckoning you forward. And you’re forever living in it, or going toward it.

I could not think of myself as rich, only as having more to lose.

Love is the lethal agent. The more you have to live for, the more can be taken away.

I had known these strangers only briefly, and only by which brand of chaw they preferred, or what cut of meat to set aside, but they threatened to fan the dying ember of the past into a full, hemorrhoidal flame again, just when I was about to leave it behind forever.

In my former waking life, back when I was working in the supermarket warehouse and living in my trailer, the daily news of current events had been tiresome and upsetting, a white-noise villain that occasionally reached enough volume to gouge the few moments of peace I’d grabbed from the day. I had avoided it. I never liked being reminded that far beyond the grand drama of my own sorry life, a larger play was taking place, one that didn’t consult me but could obliterate me at any moment.

I had possessed all of the things that a traditionally good life were conditional upon. I was functionally human. Why, then, had that life always felt like a pastime, just something I was doing while waiting for my other self, the actualized, better version of myself, to come along and make it real?