And at last, muscle memory consumes. The act of reaching for the car radio yanks his eyeballs back in time and focuses them on the television in his parents' living room. He can see his small, pudgy, outstretched fingers, grasping for the dials of the brightly colored box. The flickering lights filtered through his eyes in waves. Eighteen months of neural development has taught him well, and his left arm obeys eagerly. He is all at once lifted away from his goal by his mother, cooing in what he would come to know as discipline. He, on the other hand, had none of this. Control was a foreign language to him. Now, in the car, the stereo wailing, he finally stops himself from pressing buttons. Instead he fidgets.
He was a terrible student. Class didn't agree with him. Physically. The metal chair held him like a straitjacket. His legs hollered at him for hours, his elbows buzzed, his entire anatomy hummed for attention. His fingers complained and whined, begged to be moving - combing through the grass under his front porch or poking into the soft, feathered belly of his little brother's parrot Big Moss. Only texture would cease this throbbing. He could recognize it. Compulsive fidgeting gave way to scratching behind his neck and pressing his teeth into his tongue and forcing his toes to move past each other inside their Keds.
Music was always played as loud as it could be. Lungs were perpetually filled to capacity. Everything was always either one hundred or zero - either sprinting or dead. His hands groped for each other like lovers for sleep. As a rule, muscles were sore unless they could stretch. Hair was meant to be pulled. He knew this and had always known it.
So he grew like this. Like a weed. He drove his car endlessly, longing to push 90, 100, 110 mph. Oh, his car was killer. 1989 Porsche 944 S3 model, red of course, like everything else in his world. It thrummed prehistorically when he turned the key. It made the same sound his body always had. He planted one foot in Kurt Cobain and the other in the Bible, even though he knew that neither rock and roll nor Jesus would save him had he sailed off the road on those foggy nights. The highway runs out at a point. The strum of an electric guitar string fades eventually. Big Moss only lives for so long.
