Maria on the Road

    Some mornings the light made me angry. It filtered in through the car windows in just the right way to warm my arms and my hair and peel away the sleep from my eyes and the dust particles that hung in its rays were all my mind could focus on. The light strangled me in that way I imagined I would end up strangling someone, with a smile and a “good morning my love,” its hands firmly wrapped around my throat and its kisses dried on the sides of my lips. There wasn’t any escaping it, I gave up a long time ago tucking blankets into the windows, so instead I groaned into the leather seats and listened to cars whiz by. Morning felt more real than anything else, and that made me angrier than the sun insisting I wake up. Morning made everything a composition, painted it over with a warm lacquer of haze and fused my skin to the sunlight that I hated. Early hours were hours of feeling the seats of the Ford and my breath against my sweatshirt and looking out at the trees of the park and being able to almost feel their bark against my skin, grating against my freckles. It unnerved me and so I let myself indulge in reality very little, sitting up, pulling on my jeans in bouts of frenzied flailing, bumping my head on the ceiling, and crawling into the front seat. The key always felt good in my hand as I pulled it out of my pocket. Heavier than a gun.

     I drove until my ass got sore, which was usually around noon. At gas stations I cracked my knees and my shoulders and took my sweatshirt off in the hopes that somehow that made me more like a person though I knew full when then that it didn’t. The sweatshirt made me look more like a road weary traveler, without it I looked homeless. I was homeless in that way that everyone on the road is homeless, vulnerable and paranoid, gliding across the pavement in search of somewhere to squat and pretend they lived. We were all homeless on the highway but they didn’t know it. I hardly knew it. I knew lots of things, though. Lots of things that I thought about with my hands lazily draped on the wheel, things I thought about sitting with my legs criss-crossed under diner tables, things I thought about late at night looking at the groggy flickers of light in the distance, cities like artificial fires in the trees of the various valleys.

     I used to think about roads like they were scars, cities like bruises, mines like gashes. I used to think about people as if they acted upon the earth, unnatural, not animal, not God. But somehow the driving made me realize the rawness of people. The duality of earth. These communities of people, though gaseous and poisonous and ugly, were just as valid as the nests of bluejays tucked into the edges of forests. We collected what we found and created ourselves a home of the finest achievable comfort. Yes, we were animals. Not Gods. Not even in between. We were animals, huddled in the darkness, growling at each other as we tried to carve a space in the earth in which we could raise our young and die. Something about driving under bridge after bridge made you recognize in that deep part between your eyebrows the patterns of man were also the patterns of beast. Find shelter from the storm. Kill competition. Claim food. Find mate. Pass on genes. Die. We had simply become intelligent enough to trick ourselves into thinking we were more intelligent. Only animals could destroy like we do.

     These were my thoughts as I drove. Increasingly angry, increasingly morbid, I held onto the blackness of it all with growing intensity. The radio dulled it, the standardized hum of the universe, with light tangy beats and grotesquely emotional ballads. I would nod my head. Good song. Turn the knob. Bad song. There wasn’t anything quite so simple as a good song and a bad song then. If I didn’t like it, I didn’t listen to it. It felt like absolute control.