After stopping for dinner in a town a hundred miles from where I’d started, I got my Ragtime album by Joplin from my bag and stuck it in the CD player, pumping the sound up. It would keep me awake. More to the point, it wouldn’t feed into my depression, which lingered like a bad dream in the depths of my mind. From there, I moved on to Ella and Louis and Brubeck’s Time Out. By the time they finished I figured I’d better find a motel as it was close to midnight.
I did, checked in, and when I got to my room and had the security set, I took a fast shower and fell into bed. But I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I stared into the darkness, broken only by dim light coming through the window curtains, and wondered why someone like me, who wasn’t supposed to feel anything…did.
In the past few years, I’
