what you hold dear
You go for a drive because at seventy-five miles per hour at two-forty-five in the morning, there isn’t anything that isn’t completely clear, broken down by the warm November wind into simple answers, obvious solutions, hard realities. You drive because you can’t sleep. You don’t think about the reasons you can’t sleep. There are too many tonight.
You think about the reasons behind the things you write. You write love because you want to feel it, in just that way. You write betrayal and loneliness as though your words are a sort of talisman; you put them on paper, you ratchet up their intensity, so that you won’t have to feel them yourself, ever again. But if you do, you’ll be thoroughly prepared. And you write wonder because you never want to grow immune to it.
That’s also why you swing onto the rural routes at two in the morning, under a luminous moon, and switch off the headlights, and coast along at twenty miles per hour.
You think about the things you want most, and how they’ve never been a secret to you. There is the thing you want because it’s your life’s dream. There are the things you want because you’ve lived too many years on the wrong side of them, and enough is enough already.
After an hour’s drive, you loosen the flaps on your mittens. It’s gotten cold out, and the wind whips off of the tires and up the leg of your jeans, and your skin numbs a little. You pull the zippers on your two coats higher, flip the hood over your ballcap, drive home again.
It occurs to you that knowing what you want is the easy part. It always has been. Figuring out what you’re doing about it isn’t, at all.
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