This is it. The last day of my month long driving tour. When I enter Arizona this afternoon I’ll have traveled to 16 different states, a few multiple times, in 30 days.
This last leg: Little Elm, Texas to Phoenix is 1,070 miles and 17 hours of being in a car with myself. I hope to calculate all the miles I’ve traveled, but maybe when I’m settled a bit.
Last night I stayed in a Red Lion in Gallup, NM. I’m still in the hotel room. It’s 6:50am. I didnt sleep well in this deathly silent box. Except every so often a toilet would flush, a channel would change. I hate hotels. Give me a tent any day.
It was strange driving through Texas alone as if it massive space gives a person freedom to let their memories and mistakes run rampant. The miles seemed empty, time existed between city signs and how far a part they are from each other.
I could feel the rubber band in me being pulled farther and farther away from where I was. I could feel my body hanging on, the tug-of-war. When do you let go? When do other people let go? I feel it already: shades of forgotten. It happens when you move. When you recede from a person’s daily life; you become mildly forgotten.
There’s a Regina Spektor song I heard at my friend Lindsey’s house. I stayed with her for two days in Texas; hadn’t seen her for a year. Anyway, it’s the kind of writing I hope to accomplish, when a person hears or reads lines the author could have peeled from their own backs; the aha lines; the why didn’t I write this already; the I’m not alone.
‘I must have left a thousand times. But every day begins the same. Cause there’s a small town in my mind. How can I leave without hurting everyone that made me? How can I leave without hurting every one that made me.’ (-Regina Spektor)
My mom and dad say you move on, collect the people you love and what you are and build something new, meet the new. But I’m not there yet. Not in a blank hotel room. And that’s why there’s no stopping yet because Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland are not mine. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas have nothing for me. Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico, Texas. I can’t stop until I claim the new life that’s waiting.
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