roadtrip

It__ not about the destination. It__ getting there that__ the good part.- Leonard

Among all the machines, motorcar is my favorite machine.

I am emotional about engines, if you hurt my car, you hurt my heart.

I am so obsessed with the cars that sometimes I feel like my heart is not a muscle, it's an engine.

Take care of your car in the garage, and the car will take care of you on the road.

I love the wheels, I mean steering wheel.

Funny, how it took a little bit of pain to remember that certain parts of yourself were alive.

Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.

All of a sudden we were out of the lot and on the highway next to the mountains, flying. I put my hand out the window, and then I put my head out. I felt my hair blow behind me and the air rush into me, and I forgot for a moment to worry about how I was supposed to be. Because I was perfect right then. Everything was. And Sky was a perfect driver. Not scary. Just steady. And fast. I wanted the music to last forever.

The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go.

I keep expecting to bump into you two on the road, but maybe the universe isn__ yet ready to handle you and me side by side again.

I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that__practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, ofcourse.