Drive

There is a jagged line of blue highways that runs between where I was born in northern Illinois and where I spent the better part of my childhood in northeast Arkansas. I first rode them as a 4 year old, sitting in the back seat of my beloved grandparents' car, on the way to spend a month with them while my father and my pregnant mother went away on a bowling trip. My memory of the trip is filled with love and laughter and too much strawberry shortcake and Dr. Pepper on a hot day. The next time I rode them, I was with my grandfather in a funeral procession of borrowed cars filled with sad, angry people and moving boxes. We went the wrong way on one of the highways and my grandfather made a wild, illegal u-turn in the median to get back on track. He had the heart of a rebel, and I loved that about him. After that trip, I came to know those highways every summer as the scenery of my heartbreak, with my father at the wheel unable to do anything but drive. 

We passed through land once inhabited by the Kickapoo, the Sauk and Meskwaki, the Myaamia, the Ogaxpa, and the Osage tribes. Sometimes I imagined I could see the faces of ancestors in the clouds and in the bluffs that were cut to accommodate a highway now lined with truck stops and A&W hot dog stands. In the back seat of the car, I would follow a raindrop on the window from contact through its own jagged path, holding on despite or because of the wind until it had no more glass for purchase. Hope looked like the flattening of the land and the rising of summer corn. Despair looked like the increasing onslaught of insect blood on the windshield as night fell around us.

Eventually, there would be construction of a bigger interstate, and eventually my father would learn to drive it without getting lost. Eventually, he would let me drive the faster highways on that route, and then I learned how to leave it.

I fell in love with the road on that route. I fell in love with being nowhere, with being present with the percussion of tires rolling over tar marks. I fell in love with being untouchable by any other thing than the grace of lingering sunrises and sunsets. I fell in love with looking in the light of passing house windows in the evening that seemed to encapsulate perfect families I could never be part of. 

My travels would take me west, to the edge of the continent and along its spine, north and south. I would drive through breathtaking mountains and equally awe-inspiring deserts. I would dream about all the places I could be, but never stop, because dreams shatter like bubbles if you try to touch them.

Someday, I would find my way back to Illinois, to start over. Someday, I would make my peace with the south, and with Arkansas itself. Someday, I would remember all the places love found me along my journey, and one of those places was that jagged line of roads between hope and despair, that rests on my heart now like the gold paint of a Kintsugi pottery repair. Part of me will always be there.