interstates

My recent business travels through New York State this summer remind me of the road trips my dad became consumed with taking throughout my preteen years. He navigated those American freeways as if he’d been doing so forever. From the I-90 to the I-79 to the I-279, he was invincible. Traveling in my mom’s more sensible grey Toyota Corolla, he was still a warrior as he passed baby blue Buicks and singing minivans. In that instant it didn’t matter that his health was still too unsteady for him to work full time, even though it had been years since his first operation. I no longer cared about flying to exotic destinations like my friends did; we too were flying through those anonymous cities, blurred green landscapes, Dunkin Donuts standing glorious as they marked the miles we’d traveled.

hey now i'm movin'

For the past two years, I've fallen asleep to the quiet hum of the 24-hour bus that drives up and down the street outside my bedroom window and woken to Tender Green walls and spent afternoons with the warmest midday sun. These same Tender Green walls have come to hold my memories and helped me make memories and even held me when there were no memories I could even think of making. The walls in this room slope and make hanging photos and art hard. The ceiling is ugly popcorn and the floors may be hardwood but they are creaking and breaking, slowly but surely. There are dead bugs trapped in the light fixture and I'm partly too lazy but mostly too scared to clean them away. I've spent night after night sitting on that broken floor, staring into a mirror, wondering if it was a red lips sort of night, wondering who I'd meet, or if I already knew the answers to all these questions, wondering if he'd call or I'd text and wondering if I'd regret it all in the morning. This room is on the third floor of a house built at the turn of the century, and so the winters are always too cold and the summer's much too warm. But this room held my hand tight through a degree I never thought I'd finish and it held my hand even tighter when old hopes slipped away and new ones formed in their place and this room may not be perfect and even though it is time to leave it behind, I know I will forever search for the way this room erupting in late afternoon sunshine made me feel when this city was still new and everything still waited ahead.