Road Trips

Road Trips

I believe that we were moving too fast. I believe that on those road trips, across aching desserts, endless rain, and into the heart of the mountains, my mother was trying to escape.

We drove until we fell asleep. My sister and I curled around each other in the back seat, the fort of towels we had made pulled down, our boundary lines lost to nodding heads. My mother would still drive for an hour or so, into the quiet of a city, and I remember waking up, to see the skylight full of stars and streetlamps, and the hotel humming in the dark.

We listened to books on tape, and got lost. My mother driving past road signs, and runoffs; just feeling the car beneath her feet, the soft ease of being in control. My sister told me stories on these trips, behind the towels, and the sun, we scrunched down beneath the seats of our bug, and played thumb wars, and felt the road beneath us, moving, unsteady, as if we were floating on it. My sister had an imagination like my fathers, and she would tell me tales of first grade, teachers with tarantulas, and dragons. 100 word stories and adventures to protect me from the truth.

She let me play with Barbie’s on the nights they fought, as she crawled beneath the bed, because she couldn’t block it out. This was her exchange for my blissful memories, of sunflowers, and tree houses, and worlds we found in the backyards, like broken doorways.

My mom had a way of running away, leaving my father to sift through the dust of the house, as we traced the coast, and old country highways, the sky like a mouth swallowing us whole.