zen = amnesia = book = notes = type = profile = nhwc = px
43things = soma = three dog party = fotolog = host

between departure and destination

4-5:30am alone driving from urban to rural connecticut, listening to arcade fire with the car windows open. the sky is boiling with clouds and darkness and faint light--it could be dusk this sky, but the highway is too empty for that. yet in my solitude i indulge, i pretend it is dusk, that i have a long night ahead of me, that the birds are just bedding down in their nests instead of stirring restlessly in anticipation of flight. that people are just finishing up family dinners and retiring in front of televisions for syndicated reruns of sitcom classics. that the 11 o'clock news and warm milk and sundry other hallmarks of suburban pre-bed rituals are hours away from being enacted by people whom i will never be.

arm out the window feeling the resistence of the wind wrap through my fingers like another hand, i imagine that i am somehow more in synch with the world than i am, that my being awake and in transit is not an abberation. but it is dawn and i've not slept and i feel both empowered and out of control, both complete and lonely here in this hurtling-through-foggy-freeway moment.

memories of nocturnal solo road trips flood my senses. the feeling of velocity through the expanse of darkness is so universal. i could be on rt. 1 heading down to charleston, sc, passing through endless miles of peanut farms on a two-lane highway, spanish moss haunting my peripheral vision like ghosts. i could be driving from seattle to the vancouver island ferry, mountains behind me, water so close, family and friends thousands of miles distant. i could be driving back up to my dorm at smith after a weekend away, feeling a sense of dread returning, some paper i have not written that is overdue.

but it is getting lighter out and it is so clearly not dusk and i am alone and i am smiling and the music is swelling and building and crashing and my eyelids are heavy and i am happy to be here now in this strange transitional present all alone with the morning and the past and the future.

before = after