Phoenix
The air was too auspicious around us; something was brewing and frettering in our minds. We swam through the 80 percent nighttime humidity with visits to the grocery and the coffee shop not enough. A towel rack. A fire extingusher. A PS3. An Iced Venti No Water Green Tea sat condinsating in the small gray middle piece seperating the driver and passenger seats, just below the gear shift. Restless arms, legs, heads, bodies. Restless and the wind blew the way wind blows when it is busy announcing an event or subletting the context of an idea or a significance in our minds before we are ready to receive it all.
It is nearing midnight. We are not tired. We are tired, again – our perennial lust – of being changed, challenged, drained. Too much. Hospitals, sick dogs, work, the haz mat team that closed down my boyfriend’s coffee shop to clean up his blood, which had leaked – no, oozed – profously, onto the floor and the corner cabinet where he hit his head when he collapsed. Ambulance rides gave way to the same ER I was in not even a week prior, and hugs were exchanged with a different family. We drive past this, beyond all of this. We set out on the 202 and are sidelined by wind momentarily; the egg-like car acting as a sail for catching drifting winds with force, blowing us about the lane in highway turbulance. Older, more solid pieces of steal pass us by with ease and fury. I struggle in fifth.
We pretend we are in Paris when we breeze through the long tunnel, the yellow lights casting a metallic gold shine on my car blanketed by spots of gray every fifth of a second; more if I speed faster. Speed, damnit, speed. A lit cigarette keeps us company, stories of love and questions of love and life and local and purpose and arrangement and ‘what if?’ wander into our minds to distract us from the reality that no – we did not pursue one avenue ten years ago and hath then spent near a decade fondling our life to form well with the wishes of others.
News stories break on the radio to remind us that roads are flooded. Urgent news, it is raining. Urgent news, this is the highlight of Phoenix.
It is almost 1am, we are still driving westward on the interstate, the skyscrapers of our poor, Houston-esque city no longer visible but more visible now is the state prison up ahead. Even that fades. They remain, stagnant, in their own cubes that they have chosen. We get time off for good behavior but are no more free for the moment.
The windows are down and menthol is being inhaled and exhaled and fuck fuck fuck we are listening to music too loud and Coldplay mourns of when he once ruled the world, and we once felt there too, but we are with him – success often is nothing but modern-day failure if not kept up, not maintained, not kept in to the limelight, not used to full potential. I am a sliver, nothing more, of what could have been, nothing fucking more.
Maybe, just fucking maybe, the next 10 years could be different. But where does it start is a mystery. How. Why. The rain hits inside the car, we keep driving, breathing, there is nowhere to fucking stop. We don’t want to. We continue driving, past Palo Verde, and stop in the desert. In the silence of the night, we smoke, in the silence of the night, we simply fucking imagine.
