Blistered

Waking up and the land is swathed in brown, in wet moss and thawing repose, but little flowers line the highway and you have almost arrived. Young students in white caps flood the streets and squares, the holiday supposedly celebrating spring but they all just want to get drunk in light jackets and make out behind the budless trees. You do not blame them. It begins to rain as you drag your heavy bag from the bus, but it is a kind rain, May rain, and the sun soon returns to restore hope to the hearts of the weary. You fall asleep with the blinds down, indulgent sleep in the middle of the day and you will pay for it come nightfall, but the phone calls line your silent phone and once you walk out the door it is impossible to go home. The sunburn begins to itch.

Just this morning I ran on the mountain rim along the dam, desert sun burning itself into my memory and giant vultures circling the remains of my visit. Now I sit in my own bed, in the quiet apartment and the flowers have all survived. They climb with newborn fervor along the windows, but everything else seems to have died a little. The name on the neighbor's door has changed. The hue on my skin has changed. Nothing ever feels the same in the homecoming and yet we have to carry on as we were, we have to keep climbing that mountain. I walked up the stairs --I've walked them a thousand times-- and all I could think was I should have just kept driving that highway and never looked back.

How do you feel about second chances?

Burns

The bag lies packed in a corner of the room, filled to the brim and bulging at the seams. My agitated shrugs and short temper whisper of approaching departure, of reluctant motion. I stare into the sun, map my errands to fit the light. My sunburn smarts at every turn, but I cannot disapprove of my body's ridiculous appearance; it reminds me there is a summer coming.

I return to burning pyres of the messes I've made. The change of scenery offered a welcome relief, but the ashes smolder indefinitely, patiently waiting to be sorted out. The Road lies tantalizing, serene, westward bound and whispering of Mad Adventures, yet I print my boarding pass and return to the cold, confusing lands where my eyes do not shine as bright. This air in my lungs will only last me so long.

Watch me blow that fire out.

Stung

The sun is bright, desert bright, the skies are clear when we wake. We spend the day negotiating the border between shade and sun, but my pale skin burns regardless. I spend the evening in candy cane stripes, emanating heat into the sitting room.

Night after another it's the same story. Voices of friends decades in the making say We must get out of here, There must be more to it than this, Our lives are passing so quickly and there's a whole world out there to make. I see our youth in their eyes, see the dreams we made for ourselves when all was possible.

Across the ocean lies a world of predictability, of stability and ease. If we are to make anything extraordinary of these lives we have, we must run, we must fly, we must fight.

I look at the eyes across the room. Ten years, twenty years of friendship in the making. I would not be this person without them. We owe the children we once were together, to fly, to fight like hell.

Interstate 15

At dawn there was a great whistle from the train tracks that run through the neighborhood. It seemed too early, but a steam engine was blundering through the sleeping town and leaving no person unaware. It seemed a good day for the road.

We spend the morning playing catchup, saying do you remember, in Paris..? and the waitress can't refill my bottomless coffee cup enough times as the hours while away. When we parted ways in the parking lot, and the sun shone that way it only does there, my shoulders getting warm, the blossoming trees quickly shifting to green, my lungs itched to stretch out. I drove past the corner where we bought our first car, the day we landed in America because you are not, before you have one, sped down that familiar hill on the street that widens every year, past Wal-Mart and the Community College, to the freeway intersection that has evolved into a monster. Every time we would get on that freeway, and the sign south said "Las Vegas", my mother and I would joke that we would get on it one day and just go there. Every time the same joke. Every time the same responsible exits in time. Today I switched lanes, and I headed south.

I drove to the end of the valley, with that elusive last mountain at the end, and I thought just one more valley as the speed limit rose in silence. The hills turned greener around me, new mountains appeared in the distance, always new mountains and I thought just one more valley, just seeing what's beyond that hill, and put the car on cruise control. The sands turned red in the afternoon sun, the cities faded to wild country, traffic thinned out. The great wide roads of the American West lay endless ahead, whispering of solitude and freedom, of silence and enlightenment, and I followed that road until my limbs were numb.

It should seem naïve to think the Answers would come, simply from a highway chase into unknown lands. But as I sat on that mountain top, with the soft winds of the Southwest on my cheeks, overlooking billowing valleys that spread in every direction, the pieces fell quietly into place, arranged themselves neatly on my internal map, settled in and became clear. I turned back to the heaving car, exhausted from the mad dash into oblivion, and rolled it slowly down the gravel hill we so carefully climbed together. The freeway lay wide and calm at our feet again. We turned back north. Carried a piece of the madness, in our tracks.

UT

Nothing has changed.

I could rehash the same lines as always: the drawl in people's smiles, the pride on the radio, the smell of dryer sheets and the way the highway curves in your spine and leaps out of a mountain pass into the blossoming valley. How the sun makes unaccustomed eyes squint but how they do it gladly after so many months of darkness. I stretch my arms into the light, and the veins look like bruises underneath my pale winter skin. Their political witch hunts and ignorant patriotism hurts my very body, the nation crumbles, but no matter.

This was the land we reached in search of Adventure. This was the frontier that glittered of American Dreams and Promise. Here is the country that encouraged us to grow outside our molds, that took us in and refused to let us go.

I could rehash the same lines of how harrowed lungs breathe deeper in wide spaces, but what is the use?

The point
of Home
is recognition.

Wordless

If you always
Keep yourself
Occupied

With friends
With errands
With schedules

You don't ever have to
Listen to the silence
And answer the questions
It asks you.

84032

I lie in bed but do not close my eyes, unwilling to lose even a moment to sleep. A dialect runs across my tongue, more western, more cowboy country than I remembered and everyone's name is Hun. We drive that same highway through the mountain pass and I never tire, always lose my breath when the valley lies at our feet. Home.

You say you are looking for meaning, say there must be something more to it than this and you aim to find out what. If you find out, I wish you'd tell me. These highways only lead to places I know.