I just finished reading Fight Club and I’m pretty sure Palahniuk is still in my brain because my inner monologue on the way to work sounded awfully Durden-esque.

I’m in the backseat. I’m always in the backseat.

My parents are in the front, arguing over what kind of animal they didn’t hit with the car. It’s the kind of nothing I’d grown to expect, the kind of nothing they spoke with each other.

The car banks on a turn, and the rock salt in the jug next to me rattles against the plastic. I know how it feels. Full of jagged little pieces, unsteady and falling apart inside.

I stare out the window.

They’re the same roads, the same trees, the same buildings I pass every day on the way to work. I wonder if they’re the same people, too, the same cars. Me going to work as they come home.

Someone clicks the radio on as we cross the town line.

There’s a bad moon on the rise

The tires silently drift across the yellow dashes–one, two, three, four–then back over.

“Calm down, Tyler,” I say.

There’s a little Tyler Durden in all of us, I think. That quiet voice in the back of our minds, the temptations we silence, the impulses we ignore, the cravings that make man an animal, too.

Bite and hit and shout. Fight and fuck and feast.

Turn the wheel and crash a ton and a half of what could be scrap metal into the trees, into the ditch, into the other lane of Johns and Lindas driving home from work.

The parking lot looks the same. Same shit, different day, every day. Another commute survived.

Getting out of the car, it occurs to me how “I love you” can sound like an apology.