You and me burning matches

I haven’t been on a plane or taken a roadtrip since arriving in Portland in January. I’m unable to comprehend—as in it is genuinely incomprehensible to me—that I began this year, this very same year, in Vermont. Or that I now live in Portland. Or that every single thing that’s happened in between has happened not just in the same calendar year but only within the past 5-1/2 months. How.

Earlier this week I boarded a plane, the same plane, a couple times just trying to get to a one-flight-away destination. Earlier this week my son dodged serious thunderstorms and torrential downpours to pick me up at O’Hare so we could bring his car and apparently his entire dorm room back to Vermont. Both of those travel days started early and ended well past 2 in the morning. But we were together again and who cared if hotels were sold out (I mean, I did). Anyway, this is what we had created for ourselves timing-wise and then summer weather decided to make things interesting.

Travel is exhausting. Traveling back home (what is home anymore, what was it ever, I wonder) is exhausting in different ways. But being on the road, being on a plane, even when it’s miserable is still something I feel built for, was raised to be good at. It’s where and when I have the most forced narrowed focus. Board-sit-read-sleep. Start car-drive car-fill up gas-stop to pee-drive car more. When it’s not your turn to drive, stare out the window like you did as a melancholy teenager in the backseat of your parents’ car. Watch lightning rip across the sky like we did in Chicago at 1 in the morning. Watch the sun set in the rearview mirror like we did in either Indiana or Ohio, who cares which. Watch for deer, after this very same car hit one last year, and we watched-watched-watched, driving so painfully slow I thought I might lose it. And the eyes kept glowing from the side of the road, I’m a deer, I’m here, I’m a deer, I’m here, please don’t hit me, please I won’t hit you.

“What are you doing?” my son asked. I was posing below the trash can at a rest area in Ohio that said either TRASH or CRASH depending on how critical you like to be about type and boy do I like to be critical.

“I’m gonna pose in front of everything I see that says TRASH and send it to a few particular friends and say, ‘Hey I was just here and everyone was wondering where you were’” and I smiled at my perfect stolen joke.

“That’s mean.”

“No, it’s funny.”

You see what my kids deal with now, I imagine.

We drove in air-conditioned comfort and kept getting hit by walls of heat, the wet weight of summer, every time we hopped out at a rest area. We stopped at one that had a Starbucks specifically so I could replace my emergency Home2 Suites coffee. I went to grab a bottle of water and there were none. Not a single bottle of water.

“Do you have any water?”

“No, we’re sold out.”

“Sold out? Of water?

“Yeah.”

I looked around to the other mini chains located in this travel plaza (what a grand title, travel plaza!) There was Gatorade, Coke, Diet Coke, energy drinks, bottled coffee, your usual suspects. Not a single goddamn bottle of water. 7-11, which surely must have water (I thought, beginning to panic slightly), was “temporaraly [sic] closed”.

This is it, I thought, this is how it happens. This is how it’ll all go down.

We’ll get everything we want and nothing we need.