Driving

Where are we going? Cool wind from cloudy skies blows against my face.

Anywhere, you reply. Just somewhere far away from here.

Here’s not so bad. I say, a little joke hidden in my voice. I glance over at him, driving one handed and the other laying across the middle compartment between our seats. His fingers are long and you can see the veins on the back of his hand.

Well, anywhere with you is good, but we’re trying to go anywhere that’s away. You reply, your philosophical tone telling me that you’re writing something up in your head.

You sound like a fucking poet, I laugh at him just a little.

He smirks. Probably because I am a ‘fucking poet’ when it comes to you.

I can’t think of a good comeback for that, not after the way he left notes in my locker or on my car that spoke of a great romance. Not after he held me as I struggled to fall asleep last night and murmured lines of poems into my skin. I just shrug.

The gentle hum of the engine and tires rolling across asphalt are comforting in a way. The sound of the wind as cars pass us on the road and the November air hits my face because despite the cold, my window is rolled down. I always have my window rolled down. I blame it on car sickness but really… I just love the feeling of wind. It’s one of the best parts about the weather in all seasons. Sometimes I dream, I hope, I wish that I could be a bird. If only to fly and feel the wind against me forever.

I know it drives you crazy, having the window down. You’re a little cold blooded in your own way, always have the heat on the second it turns chilly, cable knit and fishermen sweaters emerge and appear permanently stuck to your body. But you never complain, just roll the window down expectantly. You’re reliable, steady, a boulder amidst a stream that is a little worn by time. I am like the branch of a willow tree, a little whimsical but blowing in every direction at the slightest breeze. You steady me.

I stare at the backs of passing cars. We should choose where to go off a license plate.

You laugh at me. We’re not choosing our anywhere based off of a license plate, it’s unromantic as heck.

Well maybe if we choose it off a license plate we’d know where we’re going. I like to have a plan, I don’t do just driving around without a destination. You’re a free spirit, you like the Californian motto of: go with the flow. I can’t stand it. But for you, I’d do it every day.

See that’s the point, you’re smiling that soft smile that you get when you’re writing, or thinking about me. We’re going anywhere, we’re finding our somewhere, our destination. We’re becoming one with the flocks of birds that fly south every year despite not knowing exactly where they’re going.

You always seem to read my mind. How? I wiggle into my seat a little. I still wish we had a plan.

You know, for someone who likes clouds so much, you could take a lesson from them. You glance at me from the corner of your eye as you say this and I blush.

What?

Clouds race across the heavens, You reply, not looking at me, staring at the sky and turning your eyes the color of slate. They run and chase the sun and try not to disappear before their time is up. They love life and go nowhere with a plan in mind.

Oh and how do you know that? I thought that I was the scientist here. I tease you just a bit, to mask the ache that suddenly wells in my chest. The truth, knowing that you’re right, it hurts.

You smile again, for the third time. Poets know everything, love, we breathe in the air and know its secrets, we live life in a way that no one else can comprehend. Our eyes are not covered by rose colored glasses… They are blessed by fate with a peculiar sight.

I close my eyes and absorb your words like they are water and I am the earth. I can feel them sink into me and slowly evaporate into a cloud that wraps around my heart, touching me in that way that only you can. You are like a reactive chemical, a process and formula that I can never figure out. Somehow something always happens when you speak to me, when you touch me. When your eyes meet mine with hidden promises behind your irises, when you kiss my forehead softly and tell me that you’re mine.

When we met I never could have known what would happen. An unceremonious bump in the hallway, that sounds like a bad Hallmark movie but no other descriptor could be accurate. Friendship blossomed into something more, slowly. I remember the exact day you were forever changed in my memory. It was spring, a season of blooming, warm rain, and sunny skies for three day spans prior to a week of rain. We walked down a well-traveled path through the woods. Nature sounds haunting every step of the journey, birds songs and dogs harsh barks. A chorus of children’s laughter drifted from an ancient, falling apart playground. We walked in silence, though words always seem to span the distance between us.

I glance over at you, wondering when you’ll inevitably string together a prosy sentence about the flowers or trees. Instead I was arrested by the way that the sunbeams lit up your eyes, how they outlined your delicate freckles, made you seem timeless. That was the moment I first saw weather in you, in the sun’s rays filtering through the tree’s leaves and stopping you perfectly in time forever. I still don’t know what changed your mind about me.

Maybe it was a combination of bonfire smoke and stolen liquor, when you said my skin was soft and wondered how my lips would taste. Everything in me screamed then, louder than I have ever spoken but still silent to your ears. After that I was never silent to you, you always got it out of me. By words, by actions, by kisses in the shelter of your embrace.

You take my hand in yours, halting my reverie and bringing me back to a different world. One that’s cold with winter, gray with inclemency, where you love me and we’re riding in an old Toyota. You trace your thumb in a repeating line across my knuckles, an act that makes my insides feel as though they are flying as high as a noctilucent cloud. Feeling as delicate as ice, like I could shatter at any moment from happiness, but I can always rest in the fact that I know you know how to put me back together.

You’ll do it slowly, one piece at a time, stitching me up like a master tailor. You’ll use love as your needle, lines of poems that you wrote for me, about me in the middle of the night will be your thread. And as you sew and stitch, bind off and tighten, you’ll whisper words of comfort and love and things that are incomprehensible to a scientist, but mean everything to a poet.

What time is it?

I don’t know, does it matter?

I can’t think of a response, because did it really? Or was I merely trying to fill the space between us with words that you could understand on a different level than I. So I left it there, hanging in the air of the car and staring at the scenery that we passed.

City or nature? You ask me, breaking a silence that was heavy with thought and tension and the approaching promise of rain.

Nature, I say softly in reply. I want to see the stars.

I want to show you the stars, you murmur in reply. Your tone is mysterious to me, it could be dirty, seductive, sincere, or loving. But you don’t hide meanings from me, you know that a poet and a scientist are two separate worlds, you try to bring them as close together as will be allowed. Will they ever touch? Will the laws of whatever Being that controls the earth allow it? Even for just a moment. Or will we be forced forever to live separate lives and love each other from afar?

We’re separated by language, distance, and communication. Insurmountable odds that I cannot formulate and you cannot put into words. But we try, because we love, and is there anything that comes as close to perfection as that? I may not understand you, and you may not understand me, but the beauty in that is there.

And suddenly it hits me, what you and I are doing, going anywhere in a car that you’re paying off from your uncle. We’re going down a highway that I had forgotten existed, aimlessly choosing our exit and turning down back roads that our grandparents might have known in their youth. While playing music that people our age might understand if their taste was niche enough.

We aren’t coming back are we. It’s not a question, I put it to you as a statement.

No. Your reply is simple, uncomplicated. We aren’t. Then your eyes fill with a cold fear as you look at me. Do you want to come back?

I consider it. What was holding me back? Keeping me in that mysterious ‘here’? Didn’t the horizon call to me? It whispered of secrets that I could uncover if I ventured far enough, of what you and I could share together if we stayed long enough, if we found our anywhere. If we found our anywhere, anything could happen.

I look at you, taking in your face that I’ve known since childhood, worn by time, age, and grief that we both know far too well. I have you, and I have weather. Both are omnipresent and the same thing in my head. Completely unscientific, but reality.

No, I finally say, why would I want to come back to here?

You smile in relief. I don’t know.

The smell of cheap cigarettes comes up from the floor of the car, the wind that blows against me smells of winter and wet and gasoline. But I don’t complain because you don’t complain and I love you. Your hand is warm in mine, despite the fact that my hand is freezing cold. The polar opposites are complementary somehow. And I’m with you, so I’m happy.

I smile and look over at you. Where are we going?

Your returning smile lights up the car. To our anywhere.