He was a man of no specific age.  Somewhere in the first third of life, perhaps.  Realistically, there’s no telling what stage of life a person is in.  It’s all guesswork.  At any moment, something with steel teeth and burning rubber breath could come from oncoming traffic and transform the first third of life into the exact ending.

    He worked a job that took him far away from everything.  All through the week, he wore his seatbelt no different than a business suit.  The odometer got tired of scrolling and quit trying.  It moved at random.  Sometimes it jumped ten miles a second, other times he could feed it pavement all day and it wouldn’t budge.  Outside the cab of his truck, the scenery changed from city to industrial, to vacant, and back again.  The images he passed didn’t disrupt his thoughts.  His brain was always working on something.  Breaking it down.  Building it up.  Remembering.  Whenever he was behind the wheel, he became supernatural at remembering.

    His memory was too good.  Too good at remembering the bent pieces.  Anything that went wrong, he remembered.  He remembered in detail, down to the thread count, to the weather, the smell, what his own breath tasted like.  It wasn’t healthy, this memory.  It was a hammer on a broken toe. Things that most people would forget and flush away, his memory held in its jaws like a pit-bull.

    He got too drunk once and wrecked a car with a stop sign.  That was an easy thing to remember.  He remembers the way the stop sign was doubled over like a thin man puking.  He remembers the guilt and how it weighed more than a city block.  Wobbly with booze legs, that guilt, embarrassment, fear pinning him flat to the ground.  He remembers the police.  The breathalyzer.  Things he should have been too intoxicated to remember, he remembers.

    It doesn’t matter much the outcome.  Good or bad, his brain sticks with the flaws.  The hurdles reach up and grab at the laces on his shoes.  Driving has a way of releasing these things in him.  He fixes them in his mind, rationalizes, mends, but it doesn’t change the memory.  The memory is always there, surfacing over time like a misplaced landmine.  He’s still learning how to deal with the explosions.

    With women, he remembers the trouble.  On the road, with the music off, exhaust blowing out the back, everything pools up.  Most of it is good, but the good parts swirl past.  They circle the cab of the truck and slip through a gap in the window.  All that’s left are the broken pieces.  It’s like his brain hasn’t figured out answers, so it continuously brings them up, lays them out like a confused puzzle.

    Ends are there.  Ends to everything.  Ends to friendships, ends to relationships, ends to jobs, old pets that got caught in headlights.  He remembers the ends more vividly than the rest.  Maybe it’s because ends come with emotion — anchoring emotion, that leaves long-lasting stains on things.  It might have been different if he were driving all those miles with the beginnings of stories flooding his memory, but it was always the ends that he was forced to watch on loop.  Over and over again, he watched the ends, the pits, the grueling parts.

    Some days, after the sun had beaten him though the windshield and the hours had sucked the energy out of him, he was able to watch all of these endings from a step back.  Break-lights or open road ahead of him, it didn’t matter.  His body could handled the vehicle.  It was well practiced.  But his mind, his mind was on the montage.  The ending memories didn't feel so much like nightmares when he was in these states of exhaustion.  They played like clouds in a time-lapse.  Nothing was spectacular.  Nothing was overly crushing or somber.  No sharp edges.  It was all moves on chessboard that had already taken place.  They didn’t hold specific meaning, but still, his brain forced him to watch the flames as they died. 

    It’s not a good habit to spend so much time remembering the ends of things.  When he wasn’t in the car, he took this into deep consideration.  He understood well, that remembering only the bitter ends was a handicap.  That kind of thinking was coerced by emotion.  It was magnified hot and drug out of context.  Remembering only the ends of things takes credence from the beginning.  

    Outside the cockpit of the truck, memories of the beginnings were exciting, they were magnificent, beautiful, passionate.  They played like music in his memory.  But the minute he got back on the road, those beginnings faded into white noise and bumped over the hood into the rearview mirror.  All he saw through the windshield were more endings.

    One day he quit the job.  He found a new job.  It was close enough that he could walk to work every morning.  Walking was different than driving.  He wasn’t stuck in the cab of a truck with so many endings anymore.  Without those long hours driving, he was free.  His memory still worked at a higher wattage than most people, but on foot, he could examine things in proper proportions.  On the walk to work, sometimes it was the middle of a memory that popped up, or the very beginning.  The ends still filtered through, but they came balanced by the other parts of the story.

    Things were better that way.  He was a man of no specific age.  He was always superb at remembering, but he was finally getting better at remembering the whole story, not just the ending.