Nell

 

 

This night we drove for hours, into the empty countryside, eating cherry pie
and drinking coffee, from a gas station. You steered us out of civilization,
away from the lights of any town, into a dark corner of the world, that neither of us had known existed. We turned off the radio, opened all of the windows, and let the night consume us, with darkness and sound. The sort you can only find, after dusk on a Pennsylvania mountaintop, in January.

Your old truck bumped up dirt roads, I spilled coffee on my coat, you cried. Softly at first, then thicker, heavier than your breath. You’ve always been a beautiful crier. I felt we had taken this journey before, and we had. Though it was a different night, a different road, a different car.

But, it was us, without a destination, I am certain of that, though we were younger that night, I provided the crying, over what I no longer can recall, but the night was as black any I have ever seen it, and you were driving us to nowhere, cigarette hanging out the window, hair ponytailed, and wearing that blank stare of yours.

Much like tonight, we spoke rapidly, as if the words would abandon us, if we didn’t get them all out, we were new then, or fairly so, just a year or two into this life we have built in darkened cars, this marriage of secrets, this loping and intersecting conversation, where we loot each other’s minds for the answers we do not know we need, nor want, for that matter.

Wending the course of this moment, along abandoned roads, abandoned lives, that we no longer take ownership of, as if we have lost track of time, if not each other.
With only a thirty year conversation to guide us.