Misery loves company...One
"I told Emma about the horse. That’s how the story started, in between gulps of aged whiskey sharp enough to leave me torn up in the morning. I mentioned how gnarled and filthy she was, diseased and covered in parasites. A bad trade if there ever was one. I didn’t trade away the majority of what I had earned working for Cochran out of compassion, or because I loved animals or horses in particular. She was a bad trade, the result of a drug dealer taking the left overs because he knew he could press the chosen party for much more later on. The horse was meat bound, good enough for chewy steaks and maybe glue if there was anyone around to refine it."
"I saw myself in that horse. Something broken, past saving, meant to be consumed at leisure because it no longer served its original purpose. I would like to say that I paid through the nose to get the horse healthy again because I believed in redemption but that’s not it. I put the horse through all of that pain and nonsense for the same reason I kept on mashing food with my chompers and guzzling whatever was offer at Cochran’s compound."
"If the horse came across my path, it was meant to be. I had to drag out its conclusion, put a few more tokens into the claw machine of life. Not to see what drops on the other side but to see what the claw grabs at in the first place. I didn’t want the horse to suffer, I wanted it to endure, hopelessly. To live and keep on living in the wake of being deemed useless and without purpose. I wanted one other living creature to feel just as pointless and locked in place as I did at that moment in time."
"Imagine my filthy surprise when I came along a few days later and saw that horse so ready to live, so willing to forget its past, to move on and experience the world anew."
"That wasn’t the moment I decided to kill my boss, but it was the moment I realized that you don’t need a clean slate to start over. Life doesn’t have to be perfect, it never was, and it never will be. Perfect is a fucking illusion, something ad man used to sell on magazine covers and on one click away internet articles."