This was my first short story. Let me preface this by saying that there is something fascinating about a blindfold to me. Upon putting it on it can make even the most powerful, most intelligent man--a man who knows exactly where he's going--just as lost as I am. Just as hopelessly lost as a lot of us are.
I awoke the day before to a loud 'thud' against my bedroom window. Upon further investigation, I discovered that a blue bird had brought its life to a crashing halt against the glass. A majestic creature brought to death by an optical illusion. Henry David Thoreau once wrote that the bluebird carries the sky on its back, but the sky was still up there, unfortunately.
Things weren't right lately, I would walk around lost in a daze. It was quite unfortunate, but I didn't know what to do about it. Maybe I should've seen a doctor. There's a point where loneliness and disappointment in yourself start to blur every line that you see, and you can't quite remember what it takes to make yourself happy, that's where I was. I walked unnoticed down the streets unable to hail a cab, I was invisible. At work, I'd sit at a desk in a cube, not bothered, not noticed. My assignments were emailed to me, never assigned personally by a higher-up. No human contact - I was a hermit, an urban hermit. Something had to change.
The morning that I left, I awoke to Bob Dylan song on my alarm clock radio, a song that told me that the answer was 'blowin' in the wind,' so I set out to find it. I went to see my father and borrowed his car, a 1964 Ford Falcon Futura. It was a convertible, he had bought it new and spent more time with it than his own children. I am still in utter amazement to this day that he actually let me borrow it. As a child I'd always wanted to see the Great Lakes, so I figured that would be a good start to my journey. The day that I drove to Michigan was the day that I realized that 14-hour drives across the country simply do not go by slow enough. I made frequent stops to admire the scenery and wildlife and eventually arrived in Michigan.
I took money out of my savings account and rented a cabin for a week. During my stay I made frequent trips to local markets and a few tourist attractions, namely the Great Lakes. I witnessed the majesty of the lakes from Makinaw City, near where Lake Michigan meets Lake Huron. The beauty entered my eyes, navigated through nerves and bones and squeezed my soul. I was addicted, I didn't want to settle in anywhere ever again. This is the moment that I decided that I wanted to live my life on the road.
Upon returning to the cabin, I meditated on many things. Mainly how I could fund this new life that I'd grown so fond of so quickly. At some point I fell asleep, I remember my dreams more clearly than my waking hours. This is the night that I dreamt of being a bird, flying over the world. Flying over the homes of parents crying over their children, children crying over their parents, and the entire world just crying over things that in the end don't matter. Upon waking from this dream, I made the decision never to cry again, that opportunities come and go, windows open and close, and that there's nothing to be done to change the past. I'd come to terms with the fact that I will die alone, and that's more than most people can say after __ years of life.
Before I knew it, it was time to check out of my cabin. I thought to myself, "What next?" Instead of dwelling on that thought, I just hit the road to see where it would take me. After a 10-hour drive, I arrived somewhere not-so-full of nature's beauty, New York City. Somewhere that I'd always wanted to go, but now would never go again. I eventually found an affordable hotel and made arrangements to stay for a week. I immersed myself in New York City's night-life a bit too much, frequenting bars and discos. I met a few people, only one worth remembering. Her name was Gretchen.
Gretchen was quite pleasant to look at, she had this beauty about her that was unlike anything that I had ever witnessed before in a person. She had an Autumn-sun-setting-over-a-field-of-wheat type of beauty. When we first met, I could barely bring myself to speak to her. My words escaped me, and I could not think of one word in the English language that would've been suitable to speak to her, no word worthy enough to be in her presence. I, too, felt unworthy to be in her presence. I daydreamed of her being a goddess, surrounded by a golden aura that descended upon me to wake me from my slumber to tell me some sort of duty that I would have to undertake, like building an arc, for instance. Indeed, for one moment alone in her glory I would build an arc and force two of each animal upon it. That's the kind of beauty that Gretchen had. So I asked someone to introduce me to her. Ha! How bizarre bashfulness is, as badly as I wanted to meet this woman, I couldn't do it on my own.
I met her at a disco through a gentleman that I met at the pub. We began to meet for drinks every night for the rest of my stay in the Big Apple, each night I got progressively less and less bashful around her. On my last night in New York, I gave her a poem that I had written for her earlier that day.
"You see, writing is the only way that I can tell people how I feel about things," I told her. Then I handed her the napkin with these words on it:
"You know that spot where the sky meets the sea?
Watching from the boardwalk, seeing all that there is to see?
Baby, I would tell you that that's how much you mean to me,
but all that sky and water don't mean nothin' to me,
because the ocean has a bottom and the sky has black clouds
so neither of those things seem endless now.
Baby, I would say that my love for you reaches as high as a mountain,
but mountains have peaks. Baby, this could take weeks!
All that I can say is that you're like a river to me
Flowin' and flowin'; the blood that makes my heart beat."
She didn't say a word. We eventually ended up back at my hotel, but I don't remember how. All those nights that we met I drank quite a bit of the liquid courage. I eventually got around to telling her my story, about why I'd come to New York City in the first place. I told her about my spontaneous trip and my plans to keep it up. I saw her eyes light up and she immediately asked me if she could tag along. After a few hours of trying to talk her out of it, she and I were preparing to hit the road.
The next morning, we made love in the stillness of the sunrise. The same sun that watched me play cowboys as a child, with my gun-shaped stick shouting, "BANG! BANG!" at my father as he would run from me and collapse into the grass. The same sun that I awoke to many mornings on camping trips with my father, before we'd roll up our sleeping bags and begin to cook breakfast over the campfire. The same sun that shone down on me even as I drove to Mackinaw, and then to New York City. The soft, freshly-laundered sheets of the hotel room bed caressed our naked bodies, much like we caressed each other. And in the moment, we were happy and infinite, oh, were we infinite. Like celestial bodies, two hypergiants, the most luminous stars in the galaxy shining our light from our hotel room bed in New York City thoughout the rest of the world. And our journey across this great land began like this, in the stillness of that sunrise and the timelessness of that morning.
So off we went, venturing into the unknown. I couldn't help but feel a little like Lewis and Clark trudging along through this chunk of earth that we call America, unaware of what lay beyond the mountain ranges (skyscrapers in our case) in the distance. Gretchen volunteered to drive first, which I couldn't have been happier about. This meant that I could gaze upon her flowing strawberry blonde hair blowing in the wind, and her long flowing skirt being tossed about like a plastic bag on the highway. Her skirt was white with floral print covering its entire surface. As I stared into the blooming flowers, I wondered how flowers had become a symbol of love and affection. Flowers wilt and die, that is not how I would prefer to show my affection. To each their own, I suppose.
Pretty soon we were in Pittsburgh, Pennslyvania, where we stopped along the way to get gas. As the attendant pumped the gas, Gretchen and I went for a walk. We walked down by a picnic area that was set up near the station. We sat for awhile and admired the beautiful green earth and for a moment I remembered my grandmother and her beautiful flower gardens. She always spent all of her spare time tending to her yard, making it more and more beautiful. It was all that she had in her old age. With five children to feed and a husband who worked often, I can only imagine how difficult things were for her to manage sometimes. But according to my father, she never once complained and they never once went unfed. What utter beauty she had held too, like the beautiful earth that I watched for those few moments on that afternoon.
When we left the station, we took I-70 from Pittsburgh into Columbus, Ohio. In Columbus, we found a cheap hotel and settled in for the night. As soon as we entered the room, Gretchen dropped the armful of things that she was carrying and began to kiss me. I was a bit shocked, actually, she hadn't kissed me since that morning when we'd made love in the warmth of the rising sun. I hadn't fancied her to be that outgoing, but obviously I had been wrong. For some reason, that night when we made love, I felt as if I were doing something wrong. Not that I didn't want to, I just felt that any minute my mother would open the door to find me in the bed with a woman. I did my best to shake the thought, but I just couldn't, so I just tried to keep the frightened look off of my face.
The next morning, we hit the beautiful black-top of I-70 as the sun was rising. I remembered the previous morning under the same sunrise and the smell of Gretchen's hair as it fell around my face. I felt my love for her growing deep inside of me and I wondered how long our time together would last. I knew that I loved her, but I knew nothing about her. Who was this woman? Where had she been all these years?
Seven months later in Phoenix, Arizona, I woke up in our hotel room to find that Gretchen was gone, she'd left me a note full of flowery language that at the core simply said that she needed to get back to the real world. I wasn't angry with her, I, myself was beginning to feel worn down by my journey. I was sitting in a diner that evening reading and re-reading her letter when I realized that nothing that I could find or see during my life was ever going to help me out, and that the empty feeling in the bottom of my gut is something that all humans feel, and that it is even more natural than all the beautiful things that I had seen so far on my journey. So I came home.
I wrote Gretchen a poem today, it reads:
"There's no one worth asking who can answer your questions correctly, if at all.
Not even a doctor, or someone smarter can tell you how far you'll fall.
So tie weights to your feet to strengthen your leap, to cut your hangtime in half.
For not even a doctor can answer these questions, and me, I just know simple math."
I spent hours on it, but I doubt that it will ever leave my desk. I wouldn't know where to send it anyhow. I still think about all the things that I saw and felt when I was out there, but it's good to have a home and to have something stable. Even though my stint on the road didn't even last an entire year, that's more than a lot of people get, and I feel badly for them. I still remember all the songs that I heard when I was out on the road. I hum them to myself to keep me sane.
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