Above me the clouds swirled in the azure sky, the sun beaming down into my squinting eyes, as though in mockery of my utter stupidity. Below my heaving body, the unruly grass, damp with morning dew, cooled my now feverish skin. So I thought, this is death. This is the sweet release so often painted in the poetry of great artists. “Do die is to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream” that was what Shakespeare said, and yet it was a dream that got me here in the first place. A dream that had manifested into a brutal nightmare. The romantic fantasy of self-discovery, tarnished by deaths bitter lips.

It was the 60s you see, and times were different then. The flower children and unruly hippies had brought a wave of liberation to the world and yet I found myself trapped in a prison of poor mental health and emotional suffering. Weed, the miracle drug, seemed incapable of melting my snowballing state of depression and ceaseless anxiety. And with the rise of globalisation I longed to press pause on the world if only for a few moments.

Thus, it came to me one evening as I sat in the somber and outdated living room of my parents house, that I would take it upon myself to do just that. To rediscover who exactly I was, away from the ever changing, ever expanding, ever deteriorating modern world, through means of a road trip. California to New York, in one summer. But of course my parents, being children of war, had other ideas and it seemed as though getting a car would be something of a sheer impossibility. However, like I previously mentioned, this was the 60s and times were different, hitch hiking was at its peak. No car, no worries. All you needed to travel from one side of the fourth to the other was a cute smile and some ludicrously short shorts and the job was done.

So in the July of 1967, fresh out of high school, me and my leather suitcase positioned ourselves on the side of the highway and there we waited. And waited. And waited some more. What in earth was going on? “Are my shorts not short enough?” I thought hitching them up a bit higher.

Suddenly, as I was about to admit defeat and drag my case back home in the blazing sun to await my not so approving parents, a car stopped. A scarlet Chevy impala, the car of my dreams and behind the wheel a specimen equally as alluring. For what stepped out of that car seemed to trigger a burning knot of passion in my stomach and I gulped. He must have been no less than 6ft 2, which in comparison to my dinky stature of 5ft, made him appear as some omnipotent being. On his face grew a silky black beard that appeared mysteriously well groomed in comparison to his oil stained jeans and red flannel shirt which was now faded and sun bleached. Who was this rugged God? But that was irrelevant as he signalled to me to get into the car and I climbed in with little hesitation.

As I sat on the fresh leather seat, hot from the relentless Californian sun I could feel his gaze drifting between my chest and thighs, and I could feel the knot in my stomach beginning to swell, as sweat gathered on the insides of my palms and thighs. Looking up into his deep forest-green eyes I lost myself in lustful fantasies. My mind racing between images of his hand sliding over onto my thigh, squeezing and massaging as it made its way up into the leg on my shorts.

So lost was I that I barely noticed as the car slowed to a gentle stop at the side of the road near to a small patch of trees. So lost was I that it was only one the barrel of a gun was pressed uncomfortably into the side of my temple forcing me out of the car and into a small clearing in the trees that I realised I would never see that car again.

There I lay, amongst the dew sodden grass, dying slowly. Fifteen times I was stabbed in the stomach. “To die is to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream” but my dreams were broken now, only nightmares remained.