Crossroads (working title)

The story always starts this way.  Sitting in an airport.  Running away. Running home. It is never clear which it is when it is happening, not even after the fact, I guess.   That prescient clarity can be left to Sam, my best friend.  The one who always knows exactly what mistake I am perilously in the process of making- by default-- and stands by, smirking with a mix of satisfied self-importance and chagrin.  She doesn’t  really like to see me fall flat on my face, yet she is always there to scoop me up off the cement, when I have melted down into nothing but a puddle.  But that’s another story.

This story, like I said, starts at the airport, like so many others.  Infinite impossibility, a blue horizon, heartache that has no name on which to hang itself, as if the curved pegs by the childhood cubbies that contained a universe.  It would be comforting to be able to hang that heartache on something other than my own impulse to run, always run.  Away? Home?

So, I’m fleeing the south and the dark cloud that hangs over its sons of privilege…. Fleeing the pain of dark eyes averted and world-weariness, testimony and scripture, bone-crushing work and rapture.  Fleeing the unabashed indifference to systemic injustice.  Slavery is alive and well.  I do not belong here, I think.  And still my stomach churns and my heart races, and I melt into that warm, strong embrace, contrasting skin, terse and velvet, course burlap.   Incompatible upbringings.  But how can it all end, just like that? That’s the part I want to skip to, flip through the pages with maddening speed, eyes flying over the neatly aligned type, to decipher some sort of order, some sort of meaning in all of this nebulous, idiotic feeling.

No.  The story can’t start here, I think.  The airport is trite, cliché, it is a commonplace too common even for someone contemplating selling their soul for a guitar-playing genius.  I don’t even like the metaphor of an endlessly spinning hub, a wheel whose spokes strike out, one after another until there is nothing but the dull hum, the droning that lulls you to sleep as the motor roars and the metallic body lurches, and your heart stops, for a second and you are totally, completely, one-hundred percent inside yourself, inside the moment… in the radical present.  It is rarely achievable, and so I try to put words to my story, her story.

Any story that will keep my mind off the man whose bones I crushed under my tires, the dead thud of his flesh against my bumper, the sickening crunch of his bones.  It was dark. He came out of nowhere. I tell myself this, but I flee anyway, hoping that in the air the dead cant’ haunt me.  For a moment.