passing thru / someday soon

Do you remember when you first saw an infinite sky over an open highway, accompanied by your friends singing, laughing, snoring? Do you remember when the world was broad and overflowing in your hands?

I am an earnest cliche.

We returned the night before classes resumed. I took a luxurious shower (maybe I cried a little at the water pressure), threw all my dirty clothes into the half-full hamper I’d neglected to empty before the trip, and settled back into an old armchair in the dorm's common room. A day ago I was walking in a desert canyon, and seven days before that I finished writing a final in that very armchair. Time restored itself.

Again the present flowed towards the future.

Inception is one of my favorite movies, simply because I too get confused sometimes.

I've been searching for America all along. In humid Shanghai, I imagined a brightly lit house with white walls and hardwood floors.

In high school I imagined small towns. These towns all had people who lived in 80s teen rom-coms, upbeat and carefree within the confines of their small universes. (This was before I had ever watched one of these rom-coms myself.)

It wasn't until college that I imagined big sky and red rocks, Marlboro Man's silhouette lounging against the myth of wilderness. And now I was coming to shake his hand.

Downhill - Julia Vinograd

I don't have a home
and I live there
all the time.

We sat in a McDonald's off the highway on our way back home. The TV played a disapproving Fox News segment about reckless spring breakers, and we all looked to each other, filthy and exhausted.

The Colorado River roared, emerald under the steel beams of the bridge. Even this far up, I was struck with instinctual fear by its thunder. I took a step back.

Along the side of the bridge, women from the nearby reservation were selling handicrafts. I picked two bracelets of glass beads and metal charms for my cousin, avoiding the dream-catchers, preemptively guilty and uncertain about cultural appropriation.

The smiling seller suggested I buy another, why not a dream-catcher. Calculating my discomfort against the real economic benefit of this sale, I could only come up with a pointless "sorry" squeezing out of my gut.

"A Road-Trip Plot is a work about characters taking a trip to go from point A to point Z. Along the way, they stop by points B, C, D, et al. while things happen to them at each point. Oftentimes a comedy, but occasionally a drama."

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RoadTripPlot

Time jumped back. Time jumped forward. Time spun in circles.

We checked our phones, our watches, the car dashboard. They were all somehow correct.

Map generated through Mapbox

night roads, booze run

I don't know what they were arguing about, not anymore, but the moon sure was bright

Slim Jim Peppered: Perfect for people who hate the taste of meat, but love the taste of pepper
Slim Jim Teriyaki: Worse than fruit jerky

As a junior in college, I feared squandering “the best years of my life.”

The future rested on my grades, my internships, my studies, my ambitions. For my ambitions, I didn’t need to enjoy the present only to regret my choices later.

But the present was a college luxury; society indulges a spontaneity that becomes less acceptable as we age. To not partake was also a waste. Choices, choices.

Waking up in the mornings with cold feet and numb arms

"Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, is the idea that the United States is destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. The philosophy drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion and was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans and other groups from their homes."

https://www.history.com/topics/westward-expansion/manifest-destiny

Cast of Characters, at the time

A = Up the Wolves by The Mountain Goats

S = My Will (?) by Danny Brown

Z = Creole Love Call by Duke Ellington

N = Gorilla (?) by Tyler the Creator

E = Let It Go by Idina Menzel

J = Scarlet Begonias by The Grateful Dead

H = Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist by Ramshackle Glory

narrator = Ghost in My House by Lucy Schwartz

In middle of the night the tent shakes and between one dream and the next I imagine the stakes getting pulled up, the nylon inhaling before drifting down down down.

In the morning my friend says the same thing, but in her version of events we are lifted up up up.

In the darkness of Nebraska the stars mix with the lights of distant factories.

H drives the car 20 above speed limit down mountain roads, weaving through speeding cars, confident. I shriek in the back seat.