3 and a half hours on a plane, and you've undone 3 days of driving on the road. All the bad food, the midnight gas stations, all those miles, all that conversation, it passes underneath you like a rewinding tape. You sit in your passivity, you watch reruns and eat bags of snacks, and it's all unwound.
You go back. You fly home.
And the thing you miss the most are those quiet moments in the cab of her truck. You miss the chancing on the rare classic rock station, playing an old song you both knew, and not saying a word, but just driving forward, into the night, into the future, every mile the same mile.
And sometimes you wish you could just keep on driving, all the way to the Pacific and on to Hawaii and beyond, just for another one of those moments. But mostly they pass by, you stare out the window, you measure the map with your finger, try to figure out where to stop that night. You look over at her, her face lit up green and red by the dashboard. You think about getting there, but you're already there. And you've been there all along.
And then before you can smile, you're on the plane facing the past, and the future. You're flying, you're aloft, fetal, disconnected from that long long road. You're aging a millisecond slower. You're rushing to meet the dusk.
And the wheels push into the ground again. And you're back, back where you started. And you've already forgotten the smell of old vinyl mixed with motor oil and perfume.
The second after I came, I thought to create this blog. I can't think of a better time to be inspired, while you're still being gripped inside another person, chemicals dripping down your spine, godlike delusions. It's really why writers are such fucks, such irrepressible adolescents. Well, the boys among us. I can't speak for the women.
