Highway

-The brilliant blue of the sky flared like when fireworks exploding. The night falling, darkened everything including the firework trails. It’s been years. I’m trying to leave them behind me. Packed up everything I need into a small carry on suit case and lit a match to the past. The closets filled of ghosts, I emptied and gave away the rags they cling to. They belong to Goodwill now. The house stands as a shell, a thousand miles away from where I am now and farther with each moment. I close my eyes and take deep breaths. Let the road lead me. Let fate do its best. I’m done. When you reach dead ends it’s human nature to panic, to want to turn and run as fast as you can, to hold on and cling to the little you can control. These are the polarities and I’m in between, letting go and letting the tight rope decide. There’s a sense of peace that comes over me as the remaining light becomes extinguished and head lights are all that remain. My own and interspersed into time’s dissolution, those of the sparse oncoming traffic. They rouse my awareness and my suspicions that I maybe followed. What we leave behind doesn’t always let us go, doesn’t always stay. It’s a lifetime behind me, and what I have in the passenger’s seat, might be just enough to start another. There come those points in life, when you want to simply ditch everything and run, when it seems the house you’ve constructed is about to collapse and bury you under, when you can see the eaves shivering underneath the strain. You forgot something, or like in a game of Jenga you’ve slowly been pulling out the essential pieces. It doesn’t fall however, the house. You don’t become buried. You continue. Then sometimes you wonder what would’ve happened had you run. The impulse becomes stronger each time you find yourself in such a moment, when the eaves quiver. I’ve been there a thousand times over the years, but the house never fell. I had to burn it down in the end. I didn’t have an option. And it wasn’t the Jenga pieces, though their absence never helped. I left it all, put it outside, gave it away, crushed it into pieces and compacted it. Only the house burned, but I forget how that fire started or when. Perhaps it had been burning the whole time. Had been the reason why the eaves shook and quivered. Perhaps why she left, and why I pushed her away, trying to save her from suffocating in the fumes. It was all gone, as I stepped over the fallen rafters. I looked under them searching for the space we had shared, but it was empty. The story we once lived and its remnants had long since been turned to ash. My blackened hand turned cold in the absence of a heart beat and I knew I should leave before my own heart stopped too. The bright flashes separating complete darkness make it easy to wipe those thoughts from memory, make it easy to imagine I don’t exist at all and am simply a meddling pulse in some else’s consciousness. The only thing that keeps me connected is the syncopate scratching of the rubber against the asphalt. It becomes as distinct as the whisper that told me to “let go” right before she left my life. In this darkness, this space where I am not me, where I am a pulse in some other consciousness, I can hear the highway speak. In its syncopate rhythm it tells me secrets I already know, and some I once forgot.