on the road pt. 3

“The two impulses in travel are to get away from home, and the other is to pursue something – a landscape, people, an exotic place. Certainly finding a place that you like or discovering something unusual is a very sustaining thing in travel.” – Paul Theroux

First semester of graduate school and my professor asks us to state our name and where home is. These literary-soaked strangers name places on the west coast, in the middle and a few from the south. I hadn’t lived in many places, but none really felt like home to me and what does home even look like. So instead, I thought about the place I knew the best but felt at home in the least: my body. My professor was not impressed, a little confused and asked about a place on the map. I said it again: my body. He made that sound men make when they just want you to concede.

We collect stamps in passport books and catalogue our trophies from everywhere we’ve traveled: post cards, shot glasses, magnets, t-shirts. But what about the markings on a body. That bullet-shaped hole beside my knee from challenging, beautiful, love-soaked canoe trip in Canada; blisters on feet from all that walking in Amsterdam; sunburn and hair loss and sore throat and those pants from that thrift store.

What will be discovered today? What will be lost? What will be mailed back? Someone will say a prayer for a part of the body that never felt like it belonged, so trained hands will scalpel and remove and sew and send home a body that now looks familiar, only bloodied and bruised and tender and right.

Someone else will stand beside that person and wonder what else can be removed. Wonder if one can create a gofundme page for a brain that is soaked in sadness.

Many years later and “my body” is still the answer when asked about where home is. Welcome mat long gone (did it ever exist?), windows stained, door hinges rusty and squeaked, quite a bit of hoarding. No, I guess there is no map with my body’s coordinates plainly presented, but not everything that we (want to) believe in can be seen.

 

on the road part 2

“Discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

Here, the trees are from literature, the kind which hide wild inside its bark. Living within the grass stems and rock formations: lizards and skinny squirrels.

On an early morning romp with the pup, I exhale city from my lungs. My brain forks into memories of past lives. Who was I best? How do I access that corner closet behind my kidneys that houses my widest smile?

Sometimes I fear I am most alone when I am loved.

My pup chases a family of ducks and I think about what part of my body feels most familiar. I contemplate a body not always in panic mode. I channel Proust, grow fingernail long enough to scoop out my left eye (my right one wouldn’t budge), and replace it with milkwood. I blink blink blink and attempt a resurrection.

Is it possible to rewrite how we see things. Here, in the south, Sea Grapes and Cabbage Palms. Maybe I can  unfurl the roots in me that just stopped growing.

Maybe I just need to keep digging.

on the road

“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: the Original Scroll

 

There is something that happens to the brain during a very, very long car ride. It becomes a highway, stretching out, gathering traffic, sending out signs offering helpful bits of information (slow down, working zone). When I am behind the wheel, while he keeps track of license plates, I watch the silent film of landscape; I wonder what it is like to be a tree in the median which never gets climbed, carved into by lovers or hugged; I wonder if I will make it to my fortieth year of existence; I wonder if my mailbox at home has mail for me yet. He wants to talk, but I somehow left my words in Brooklyn. I use the wrong vocabulary here and I don’t know the right dialect for manners in the south and I miss the sound of graffiti scraping off tongues that has become such a familiar sound in my city. I guess leaving is the best way to fall in love again.

Migration

Against hip, an odometer.

My bones go twenty-two miles above speed limit but no one is watching.

My blood is without signal, so the only music I hear is static and a hum of talk radio.

The check-engine light blinks against my knees and I wonder what would happen if I never turned left or right but just remained forward. Would I fall? What corporate chained coffee shop might I crash into?

It is too easy to write that I am in search of the wild I buried in Nebraska and Colorado.

It is far too complex to mention that I’ve contemplated jumping off a diving board made from rainfall and seaweed.

I threw a party for my feet somewhere between Chicago and South Dakota but they never showed up.

I collected fourteen speeding tickets while living in New York City and I never even owned a car.

When we look up and the moon is being chased by its shadow and everyone from above and below has traveled days just to see it and the one who lives beside me kisses me back into calmness while the earth grows dark like underneath soil and the water still waves even from far away and everything seems possible again.

you are (here)

It is pronounced: map. One syllable with proper push of “pppp” at the end. 

Or atlas, if you’re lucky to have a gathering of many.

They can be found in glove compartments in automobiles and in backpacks, folded neatly like an intricate fan of coordinates.

Lately, it can also be found with a mouthpiece, titled GPS. A rotation of satellites orbiting in the sky– when positioned correctly– can let you know whether you need to make a left or right or….

RECALCULATING….

On a road trip many years ago, in a subaru hatchback with enough room in the back for a foam mattress, there was no voice letting us know how to get to where we needed to go. We dug out a rand mcnally and leafed through pages that could have been called art. When we got lost, we stopped somewhere and asked for directions. Conversed with locals and breathed in the air of new (to us) land.

Then, we weren’t reliant on fancy phones guiding our every move.

Then, there was no contraption plugged into car to dictate our route.

Then, adventures felt more FREE form.

We have forgotten how to get lost. We dig out our lovers from left or right pocket, swipe in several directions to get us where we need to go.

We don’t wander as much.

Some don’t wander at all.

I am detached from a GPS. I carry around tiny pieces of paper with tiny shards of ink curled in, with my directions, that I carefully looked up. But if I get lost, I ask those around me who are attached. Or…I allow myself to wander until I really need to be where I need to be.

You are ****here******.

But maybe you can get there a little slower. Leave earlier next time and give yourself extra room for wandering. Slice in a little escapade into your day.

You may be surprised by your ability to go a few more minutes, even hours without the help of your palm pilot.