Bob Dylan - "Desolation Row"

I could hear them last night as I tried to fall asleep, a symphony of angry roaches mourning their friend I had killed earlier in the evening.

I had been enjoying a burrito from Mesa Azteca, lamenting the approaching end to our relationship, knowing that in a week I would be outside of this particular Mexican restaurant's delivery zone. There will be a new favorite burrito delivery service certainly. There is always a new love eventually. You forget what you had with that past boyfriend. You have someone new to snuggle with at night. Or you don't, and you cling to memories of how good those burritos used to be. Knowing that there are plenty of good burrito places near my new apartment didn't make the end to this relationship any less sentimental. I looked out my window admiring the view that I would soon no longer see, tried to hold on to it, these Bushwick brick houses, the roofs of which form clean lines running toward horizons, toward far off street corners, the blocks long in this neighborhood.

That's when I saw it out of the corner of my eye, a massive roach, the kind you find in Florida, some holdover from the Jurassic era. The little ones are bad enough, but these big ones produce a terror and disgust beyond reason. I grabbed the roach spray and knocked it the floor in a stream of poisonous chemicals. Cheering on death, chanting it into being, into not-being: die, die, die.

The constant battle against roaches is something I will not miss about this apartment. The roach lying on its back, squealing in pain as it died, quickly brought to an end the mourning I had been doing about what I would leave behind when I left this apartment. I don't think I have ever heard a roach make noise before - that's how big this creature was. It made some audible high-pitched noises as it convulsed. 

And because I had had too much coffee in the evening, I lay awake, weed not putting me to sleep, Benadryl not putting me to sleep, jerking off not putting me to sleep. I heard the sound of crickets or some light squeaking noise coming from somewhere. My mind soon made this sound out to be a chorus of roaches haunting me, squealing around the edge of my bed. 

I woke up this morning to quiet. I walked to the subway. Everything was beautiful, is beautiful.