Last night, for the second night in a row, I took a long wasteful drive through the endless city bricks, gravel, and asphalt laid out in each direction but east. It is easier now, to sit instead of stand. And ever since I got back from my prayer to the West, I’ve had a need to nurse the blisters those roads gave my palms by driving even more. So my walks have become rides. Dangerous looks at the far horizon, like a horse in its circled corral, punching the dirt outward ever closer to the fence. Most of the time, it’s just a wish as I sit by the street and sip on something jolting. I take an errand across town and I want to keep on and on, past the daylight’s furthest reaches.
When I was a kid, I’d sit outside on days like this and look across the street at the first house I ever knew. The pavement was a dull gray. I’d eye it for minutes and with fingers outstretched I’d slowly lower my palm to its surface with numinous fear and longing. On contact I would hear it, and my veins would race with the wild knowledge that by this road my hand knew them all. I thought of cities and oceans and slums all connected, all webbed and one. They throbbed beneath my hand, and in my strange way I was touching everywhere. Too hot to touch long.
These recent drives took me to neighborhoods where racked with cautious prejudice I thought black men might kill me in the bright of day, and neighborhoods where white men might too, under the shameful cover of night. I belonged to no place. I have always taken these rides, since before I had keys of my own. I go to tide my wishes over, to nap my soul. It’s on those fast ribbons and slow stoned streets that I find the greater rhythm. It’s out there moving, that I see his heavens declaring. A silent music that is infinitely fast, unfathomably slow. And when I see it, out the side of my eyes, I can sometimes whisper in. Speaking softly of that which I lack, and all that’s missing from the picture.
The journeys a kid inside me dreams of are not these city drives I have taken. The night rides are like iron rations instead of paradise. But even long ago, little and beaming, I knew that I would never go to the furthest place without a reason. And only once, have I had one. Before I was even in to girls, I knew it was girl that would bring me. Even in its thrashing sorrow, that trip lived up to every inch of hype and cinema my young imagination gave it. Because once it began, and even in its sadder moments since, my unbelief was left cowering and defeated by the side of shrugging billboards in Utah.
Now grown, I rarely put my hand to the street, out of fear for what I’ll have to feel. Just like the box we keep of love’s old letters. In this sad age it’s a bloating e-mal inbox. Nonetheless, we cherish the thing, we save it cause we ought to, because on that unlikely distant day, we’d hate to have to say it’s gone forever. But rarely do we dare to know again what it stores. For me the road gives the same shudder in its tempting. An endless land of promise, with only longing on the way. We open the box because we miss those days. We read the words and miss them so much more.
In a tiny parking lot by a lighthouse, at a place called Point Reyes, after opening the road till it was finally swallowed by the sea, I dared once more bend toward the tarred gray grains. For the first time in years, now on a bad knee. My hand didn’t shake like a boy believing, and I knew the road wouldn’t be hot, because I had tamed the dream and turned myth into bland reality. The continent now knew my name, if anyone did. But the touch gave more feeling than I feared for. This road can take me home, I almost whispered. And on that road, those many roads, connected and unanimous, I was a boy alive with low love and wonder, knowing for certain that unlike the destination behind me, there is no one place, no end called home. It’s the way he whispers, in the highways. I hear it in the deep heart’s core.