mei

i decided that it was time to leave so i needed a car. one of the older ladies in town had died recently, leaving an old white honda civic, and i'd made friends with her daughter, who ended up holding the estate sale. i bought the car for $500, and named it platelet, and we aimlessly floated around the nation's circulatory system for a little while. i love the road late at night. i do not mean for love to be an abstract term here - i mean that late at night i engage in the act of loving the road. it's like sex but more subtle. i rode my platelet late-night into the hazy blue coronas of gas station fluorescence, and i bought as many candy bars as i wanted. i'm learning that at a certain time of night, at a certain number of rpms, the vibrations begin to sing songs into the space behind your eardrums - songs that keep singing themselves even after you pull off the road to listen. i shut my eyes and listen once i've rolled to a stop, and the car shudders against the shoulder as the semis whip their fat fast tails past us. i love realizing that there are really only the most mundane rules in the world. people, nobody's stopping you from waking up at 3 in the morning to see the lunar eclipse, and then running into someone's cornfield with a ball of yarn to find your way home. you can eat a watermelon or a receipt, you can stop your car and check over your shoulder only once before walking backwards until the car recedes into a tiny dot on the horizon and you've trusted the world a little more with every step. you can buy a bottle of beer and pour the whole thing into the dust to watch how it rises up in bubbly ridges and streams and swirls along the path of least resistance, and you can learn both something about what to do and what not to do in your life from that bottle of beer.

i ended up in ohio after a number of days, and i've been working at making sandwiches at a deli in the middle of nowhere. you'd be surprised at how many people from nowhere want sandwiches.