08.27 The Drive
from the road
- The prettiest bathroom, at our very first rest stop.
I left California as quickly as I could, packed up what was left of my room- old New Age books from the 70s, some bikini tops and tchotchke from antique stores and Disney-themed souvenir shops in Anaheim. My bedroom looked like the bottom of a purse. I never took care of my nice things.
- Mariya’s new hat with the tags still on / the first sunset.
Mariya and I talked through most of Arizona and New Mexico, gave each other breaks when needed in Texas. We were full off of waffles, the size of our heads, from the motel breakfast. We would scoop huge amounts of butter and syrup on top, sometimes cinnamon if they had it, and would pass it back and forth, taking bites, though we always got full after a few. We cared more about the way it looked, the mise en place. The orange morning sky bled into the evenings; we would drive all day and look for mirages, tumbleweeds when we could. We loved the desert. We joked about moving there, getting jobs in pottery shops, scamming tourists as fortune tellers. I thought about all the time I was wasting, and I didn’t care. I’ve always preferred living on wasted time, it’s much more fun. I had left my favorite sunglasses, my almond shower oils and my pills, I felt naked.
- Billboard no. 1.
As we drove further, the billboards had an effect on me. I grew up with the funny ones: NUT MILK = NOT MILK. YOUR WIFE IS HOT, GET YOUR A/C FIXED. The deeper we went into the South, the darker they became, about the fires of hell, repenting. In Louisiana, I began to sleep badly. I thought about home, about what the town would look like now; if it had befell to the fate of small towns in the age of the Internet, outlet malls and “vintage themed” speakeasies, happy hours that people found through Instagram. My mother promised me it looked the same, she had never wanted to leave. California is too civilized. We’ll never last here. I thought about all the parks I had learned to walk in, scraped my knees until they bled raw, all the beach shacks we had to run into when it started to rain. How, on those days, my parents would order an ice bucket of beer and clams to share, like the storm was a celebration. I thought about all the time I was wasting by driving, the aching 4 days. I thought about all the years I was wasting, wasting, wasting away.
- Billboard no. 2.