There are two things I'll always remember about that time, no matter how sketchy or surreal the rest of it might get: how it started, and how it ended. I want to start there, at the end of everything, because the memory is fresher and hell, it's a good story.

And I can pinpoint the exact moment it happened, too. When the buzz finally died, that is. Like any good high, it had been tenacious, hanging on for weeks longer than it should have been allowed to, almost spitefully, like a little old wrinkled octogenerian who knows that the family is ready, they've bought their funeral black, they've picked out the coffin, they want to deal with the grief and pick up the pieces and move on, for fuck's sake, but there probably isn't anything anyone can do, and maybe Granny's just having way too much fun. I hated the buzz, at the end, and that final death rattle was like cold water on a burn.

Time of death, 2AM. It happened in some franco diner, Chez whoever, off the main drag in Podunk, Northern Ontario. The fuck was I doing there in the first place? I'd been driving down one of those highways to nowhere that you only get up north, with that wall of boreal forest on either side that'll drive you mad even if you aren't coming off a two-month binge. I'd started sweating, my hands shaking and slick against the steering wheel, knees jerking so bad I couldn't keep a steady speed going for more than a few seconds at a time. Some staticky AM radio music had been licking out of the speakers, and I'd cranked it to drown out the sound of my breath dragging itself in and out between my grinding teeth, to distract myself from the dwindling proportion of drugs in my bloodstream. I'd known it wouldn't hold me for long though, and I'd veered off the highway first chance I'd gotten. Hence the town. Hence the diner.

The shakes weren't going away as I sat and poured alternating shots of salt and sweetener into my coffee, and I knew that this time was the one. I'd made the vague decision sometime in the past few days to let this thing ride itself out, dumping the contents of my duffel bag along the deserted highway from my car window, giggling at the vivid image of some moose getting twisted on the stuff and rampaging through the tundra. Now that the coming-down paranoia had hit, I was more worried that some mountie patrolling the highways for escaped convicts and runaway drop-outs would find it and link it back to me, follow the trail of drugs to this place, and in a frenzy of sirens and flashing blue lights they'd come bursting in here to haul my ass off to jail. Would there be camera crews to transmit my downfall to the folks back home in the civilized world? Could the media be bothered to come all the way up here? Probably not. The thought was reassuring, that I could crash and burn and no one that mattered would have to know, and I managed to calm down enough to signal for the waitress to bring me another cup of coffee. And maybe some water. Cold water in a big glass.

I needed to think. Get my mind in order. What could I remember? I remembered leaving home. I'd just graduated and quit the shitty part-time job that had more or less carried me through three years of higher education. I was looking for something else, something to kill time and, I'd naively hoped, give me a taste of the real world before I jumped right into grad school. But then what had been a long time coming had finally arrived, and I couldn't take it anymore. I'd taken a look around my place, at my books, my clothes, the posters on my walls, and loathed all of it, loathed the person who could collect these things and put them together and think they said something meaningful about her. I'd had it with this life in this city, the people in it, the people I knew, the person I was, and I'd had to leave.

It had occured to me then that I had nowhere to go. Not that I was stuck. I was uninspired. It was another two weeks before it hit, two weeks of no job, no school, no purpose, and by that point I'd turned pretty desperate. Maybe that's what turned the light on. Either way, I'd figured that if I could sort out what I was looking for - I still thought at that point that I was after something, some answer - I'd know where to go looking for it. So. I'd been wanting a taste of the real world. The real world. Real, authentic... authenticity. And there it was. The holy grail. I remembered having gotten the distinct sense then of something huge, like maybe we're all in this together, like it's the grail so we're the crusaders. This hadn't lasted. It had disturbed me, for one, and more importantly had gotten in the way of my self-alienating contemplation of the inner workings of my own mind. But it'd done the trick. I was going to go off on a quest for authenticity, and finding it, I'd thought, would redeem all of existence in my eyes. I wanted to laugh at myself, the kid I had been - kid? It'd only been two months! - but I wasn't entirely sure I could stay on the right side of hysteria. The kids in the booth beside me were already giving me funny looks, and the waitress wasn't even trying to serve me anymore. Better to keep as quiet as possible, and focus. I'd blown a lot of time and money on this and I was vaguely terrified that I would come away with nothing to show for it unless I made sense of it all as quickly as possible, as close as possible to the original experience. Of course, that was just the drugs. I'd have known better, sober.

Anyways. I had the what, when, and why. The how of the story, I decided, was the car and the money. More specifically, my beat-up Ford Escort and the money I'd been saving to go to Europe to 'find myself'. I'd nixed that plan right after the authenticity epiphany, figuring the last place to go on this kind of mission was Europe. Beyond that, the where wasn't clear. I had vague recollections of the places I'd been, other diners like this one, scratchy motel sheets I'd slept on, sticky countertops in smoky bars, but I couldn't tell how many there were or if I was really just remembering the same one over and over again. I'd taken notes, of course, but I couldn't bring myself to read them. Part of my plan had been to stay clear of cities, I knew that much. Nothing authentic there, I'd thought, not among the high-heeled buttoned-down civil servants who talk about their pet cause like they do their favourite coffeehouse, not among the indie hipsters who only enjoy something if it can be done with ironic detachment, not among the hordes so skilled at posing and pretension, I'd figured, that they didn't even know they were doing it, or knew but wanted it, which was worse, but whatever, I didn't want any part of any of it. Small towns, then. I'd had some romantic vision of sitting with the hard workers, the farmers and the labourers, the small-town folk who'd barely finished high school and had no reason or desire to put on airs. I'd wanted to find the people who came by what they were, what they liked and disliked, what they wanted, honestly, sincerely, authentically. Which covered the who of the story.

I couldn't remember any of the details, really. They were there, no doubt, and if they weren't they'd be in my notes, but I couldn't piece together anything concrete. That didn't matter. The names and the dates didn't matter. All that mattered was that I knew, sitting on that vinyl bench in that diner, that I had failed. Not because I hadn't found anything real. Not because I hadn't encountered authenticity. I'd failed because I had not been authentic, and remained so, and had always known it, and seeking authenticity in the outside world, even finding it here and there, had merely hinted at the depth of my own lack thereof and my staggering inability to do anything about it. In the end, even these words have meant nothing. They aren't real, they don't convey reality. They aren't what I think, what I feel. And that's my failure. Not inauthenticity, but this continued cynicism. Because, what else have we got? What else is there? Anything else would be inauthentic.