Sally woke up unusually quickly. She had no more energy than on any other morning, but she immediately opened her eyes completely, turned to lie flat on her back, and stared straight up at the ceiling. She considered that this already made it a good morning, and then that made her feel terrible, which made it a normal morning.

The first complete thought that formed in her mind was: what do you do when you’re in so much pain you can’t function? Her next thought was how trite that would sound if you wrote it out like a sentence in a story.

Most of her day was the same as any other that had come and gone in the course of her trip. She packed up her things again, checked out of the motel, and threw her little carry-on in the trunk. She drove around town a little — there was a town this time, but not always — looking for something to do. It was so hopeless an exercise, she said in her mind, that it could be clinically considered a form of self-harm. She thought that was funny, maybe.

Admitting that there was nothing there to find and that life therefore had no meaning, she got back on the highway. At least things are consistent, she thought.

Her playlist fed her exactly what she needed in order to keep feeling exactly how she felt. The Morrissey songs always come up when you need to tamp down the annoying sense of mild relief you could start to experience from doing too much of literally anything. She chided herself for these “cute” ideas, but it did kind of feel that way.

At some point in the day, and who cares when, she stopped at McDonald’s. She always just got a Big Mac combo when she was feeling down, not because it was her favorite thing there but because it reminded her of childhood. It occurred to her that she would feel guilty including that detail in a story about her life — capitalism had already won, and McDonald’s was doing well enough without her damn help.

She parked the car and sat in the lot with her food and an empty notebook out.

She also hated admitting to nostalgia, she then recalled. She often wished she could escape living on the timeline of the whole rest of her life before the present moment; she wished she could forget the entire past.

For some reason, and she did consider it an odd connection, the next thought in her mind was that she wasn’t always sure she was even a woman.