When the only rule is gravity and the only important direction out, it hardly seems right to set out in search of maps. But some things may forever be in want of order, so the pile is packed and ordered (waterproof, tear-resistant, vision-quest approved!) and the trailer half-loaded, an unknown still weeks away. I've never been much for waiting.
So push off these goodbyes that just keep lingering; I'll lap up the sweet open road, hoard the sweat that stings eyes and burns raw sores. Forget these backwards friendships -- sweet as they may be -- and all the ways we've broken through the years. As always before, prescribed the standard treatment: set off in search of something new, another beginning. Amnesia in distance. In the absence of a history, what regrets can time still shoulder?
Still these are lies: all these miles are forever no more than strings across memory and sensation, all these aches just repetitions of so many days past, over and over and over again. Forever cliché: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Summers back, sitting on the curb with beers in our hands and the sun in our face, we decided the only constants were hunger and loss. An addendum, then: love and memory are just as eternal, two more words for one same, like breath and time.
Two weeks of waiting, three and a half or four of traveling. Only two more weeks of only an easy run away from each of those ghosts, two women and six years and six hundred conversations of somedays, and if the sun won't shine, by god how fast I'll run. Run and ride and run and ride and the great open west awaits, and what won't be forgotten will at least start fresh. I'll always find a new bearing.
Image: Peter Cohen
