A grimace: shining cherry lips were bitten in a moment of suppressed indignation, tempered by a benevolent understanding of mankind which reluctantly extended to the silly driver who had slammed on his brakes at an inopportune moment. From her lips escaped a low sigh; small potatoes. This was life, and she knew it. Another test arose in its place; the imposition of a stop sign on a well-intentioned person with far more on her plate, far more to achieve, far more drive: incomprehensible and somehow offensive.
Graceful fingers swept nimbly across the CD player, activating its contents on a child’s whim.
I could not stand this song. Poor instrumentation, with shallow lyrics spun in contrived sentiment. They yearned for a day gone by, an admirable pursuit, but without any hope of the future conveyed. Devoid of feeling, the noise was meant merely to pass the time, some sort of drug.
Painted fingernails tapped the steering wheel in rhythm with the beat, mouth silently forming the words into the cold January air, artificially made warmer by the car’s dingy interior.
The eyes mistily ascribed meaning; a universe, all her own, was swiftly created from the ashes. The song had meaning, significance, suddenly, as if it had materialized from the clouds above. It spoke of cold dawns with tea clutched in tiny hands, of summer evenings spent listening to the singing of birds and the whirring of a lawnmower, both beheld with equally rapt attention. Portraits were painted of splashes of color, of friends huddled around a fire, of long drives into the night; drives no less than this one.
The song had taken on her persona, and had become part of her.
As the little car ambled around the dark streets, aimless in direction but firm in purpose, none of its occupants were ever to be quite the same. Countless shadows were flushed from hiding by the guiding headlights, speared upon the piercing halogen rays. Peppered with stars, the otherwise ink-black sky served as a reminder of a scope far greater than that of the meandering metallic box, though it held no dominion as the music continued to issue forth from the smudged plastic dashboard.
I loved that song in all its newly spun identity.
----------------------------- Or: The Ever-Staring Clock Breaks in Two!
The unforgiving asphalt vanished between spinning rubber tires as a journey was unfolding. A jaunt to the beach, a relaxing weekend, had been engendered and hatched in the late July heat.
Same car, same occupants, same resolve.
Trapped. Coffin on wheels, hurtling towards oblivion through uncertain days. Fingers sweaty, fumbling over dull objects, searching for a measure of comfort, a gentle caress to a restless heart and mind. I squeezed the innocent cellular phone so hard that it has blinked ever since; “I need to go back,” stated with feigned tranquility and status quo. “But I can’t; It’s the last staff trip, I need to spend time with Justin and Seth and Brian and…”
Jake promptly brought my blabbering to a close. “Alejandro, let’s stop at this gas station, think it over. Think of yourself for once.”
I imagined what spitting his words back into his kindly face would look like.
I entered the convenience store. Ubiquitous mayhem was the order of the day for this gathering of the lost and the wandering. At least prepackaged snack products and fizzy drinks united us. Behold! A cling-wrapped sub with a brand name that could only inspire hilarity stared at me; I felt a little better as an imaginary egg broke over my unkempt head and trickled down towards my toes, as gravity would most often dictate in such a hypothetical situation.
I staggered toward the bathroom, upper teeth digging themselves into my lower lip. Opening the door, I caught a conversation in its dying moments.
“Ya gotta hitch the trailer up right, or else it’ll be drifting all over the place, you know? You don’t want that, that’s bad news. But what I’ll tell you surely is, since you’re just starting out trucking and all; it’s strange. You never get to see your family, you know… I mean, one day you just slow down from work and you realize that your kids are all grown up. You miss a lot, you know. But someone’s gotta do it.”
A brisk walk found me fleeing the truckers’ bared soul. I strode out into the blinding sunshine, seeking my compatriots.
“Brian will take you back, it’s only about an hour drive,” Jake blurted out with an expression quite unsure of itself. His eyes radiated empathy.
“No,” I half-whispered. “We’re going on an adventure.”
A little louder, “Life is too beautiful.”
