break in case of emergency (april 24, 2021)
the great american road trip is entirely too deserving of its celebrity. it’s camaraderie and momentum and a welcome sameness that allows me to breathe.
i’ve always wanted to go on a road trip with you; i used to imagine the music we’d listen to and the conversations we’d have, and there was never any fear attached because, to me, road trips are the antithesis of change. there’s a fixed point placed at home, the origin of all of our greatest hits, therefore there is safety in venturing forwards.
i am scared that all of our best days are behind us, made to live and die at their nexus.
now i imagine our road trip as “one last ride,” because my neurosis can’t help but cling to cliché,
and if we have to end, i want my fixed point, some line in the sand.
i would make you drive but let you play your music, all while trying to learn the parts of you i didn’t already know. there’s a poem about wanting the people you love to know everything about you (the big things like my unassuming narcissism and the small ones like the way my tongue itches when i eat spinach), and i want that as well. i assume it’ll feel like cramming for a test, even if you don’t care whether or not i know the answers.
i can picture the way rain would start to plink away at the car’s roof a few hours into the drive so we’d get a little quiet instead of raising our voices over the noise and i’d grab my jacket from the backseat and slowly pull it on and try hopelessly to commit every detail of this moment to memory.
my ninth grade english teacher taught us that water in literature tends to symbolize change, and i’d silently file that away as i watched a summer storm poetically place a pin at our journey’s end.
at least, that’s how i picture it.
the jacket warms my torso, but my wrists are poking out of the sleeves so i figure it’s best to give it to you instead, and maybe, when all of this is in your rear view mirror, you can look to the passenger’s seat; i won’t be there, but the jacket will, and it’s just your size.
