Driving into a storm (Taken with Instagram)
O, summer—driving barefoot into the evening sky with a cigarette balancing between my two fingers and all problems vanishing into the darkening east (where she is somewhere), but my vision narrows as the day slips away until all that exists in the short span of road just ahead of us and it’s all that matters. Who knows what will come, and why coax the truth out of a dead thing? Let it decompose until its energy seeps back into life, regenerates, and becomes a part of me, something I can use to move forward.
The sky that night was such a wonderful red — a sorrowful passing of a remarkable man reflected across the outer dark. Loss will remain an impossible experience to comprehend: Where you’ve gone mixes in amongst my late night philosophical musings when my seasonal insomnia brings to mind subconscious upwellings of fear and curiosity and claustrophobia. But when I’m driving at 75 miles/hr. across the state of North Carolina, and the shitty backdrop of the Charlotte Skyline vanishes in the rearview mirror and the piedmont opens up to summer thunderstorms and strobe light flashes of lightning down the center of the southern sky, the smell of rain teases my nose and the rush of humidity softens the hairs on the back of my neck, I am at once apart and a part of everything, singing loudly to old hits from the early 2000s and laughing so hard the road passes unnoticed and for a moment this world, in all of its complexity and contradiction, fills me up until I’m grinning silly with no explanation, but this is. This world can’t be wasted on façades and judgment and trying. With so little time, why would you ever waste it with people so terrible, why would you ever give yourself the shorthand?
We deserve the kitchen sink. Your definitions are subjective. Celebrate your life, I suppose, until it’s over and everyone you’ve known can gather together in a cramped, overheated chapel and celebrate yours.
