Narrow Tunnel

I don't realize how hard I'm gripping the wheel until my hand starts to ache.  Prying my fingers loose is like trying to pry steel bars apart.  45 isn't fast enough, and neither is 50 or 60.  But I temper the foot on the pedal so that I'm just on the verge of going too far over the speed limit.  The road I'm on isn't long enough.  No road is long enough.  I just want to drive, fast and far, until everything I'm running from is a speck in the rearview.  But the things I'm running from are stitched into my skin and my head and my heart like they're supposed to be there.  Like I was out cold and someone thought they'd do me a favor by making them permanent.
I click the dial on the radio up, up, up.  Until I am the obnoxious person on the road whose music seeps into the cars around me when we slow down.  Until the vibrations buzz through the car and through my chest and into my lungs and make it hard to breathe.  But I'd rather drown in the songs on the radio than the pain that I'm trying to numb myself to.  The pain that's racing up behind me like a runaway train off the tracks.
Every zip code I speed through takes an ounce of pressure off my chest.  And when I finally get towns and towns away, and my breathing is easy and the tears aren't stinging my eyes anymore I realize I've got to go back.  It doesn't matter if I drive in circles out there for hours or if I sit stone still in my car in a parking lot because before too long, I have to turn around.  Leaving is like driving through a narrow tunnel that widens a little more with every inch; the light at the end gets brighter and bigger until the sky opens up above you and you're free.  Coming home is watching the tunnel narrow every smaller until you can hear the roof of the car scraping the top and see sparks catching on the mirrors beside you and the light at the end dies slowly until it's only a pinprick.
As I drive home, I try to breathe the way they've taught me.  I try to count the colors, count the clouds, count the cars.  I try to talk my self down and focus on the lyrics and not on the thoughts that scratch at the back of my mind like mice demanding to be let in.  I try and try and try.  But no matter how far I move or drive or run, no matter how long I'm gone, the pain always catches up to me.  I drive home and the closer I get, the tighter I hold the wheel until my knuckles are white and the edge of my vision is black and everything in between in the bright red spark of fiery pain and panic.  I drive home and the closer I get, the louder all the thoughts are and the less it matters how high I have the radio cranked.
Fingers grasp the wheel in a death grip, my chest constricts with the poison my own body sends to betray me and my eyes dart back and forth looking for predators, looking for danger, looking for ghosts.  When I pull in the driveway, it's like falling into a pocket of safety, a three hundred square foot space where the outside world doesn't know I land.  But the walls close in the longer I sit, so soon I'll have to go again for another drive, another attempt to run, another chance to breathe easy and I am so incredibly tired of having to run.  I just want to live.