she sees these visions, she feels emotion;
she says that i cannot go—
she sees my plane in the ocean, and
"what about your friends,
don't you love 'em enough to stay?"
and i say, "if i don't leave now,
then i will never get away."
BRIAN ALWAYS SAID, if you don't leave now, you'll never get away. It gets away from you. Time. If not now, when? Never.
Never in your wildest dreams did you believe you'd rip down I-78, blow through New Jersey going 92. But you'd forced yourself off a rural road—a pitstop in Pennsylvania—into the Garden State, following signs for New York City. East.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, kiddo, Dad always said. Before you told him you had to go. You needed to go. You didn't know where. You didn't know when. You didn't know if you'd ever come back.
Nobody tried to stop you.
"Whatever you're running from," he'd only warned, "it will catch up to you. It always does."
That's why you'd zigzagged, retraced, backtracked, into Georgia, Colorado, Indiana, Massachussets, Utah, California. You'd circled a country, fled, brought it to sleepy cities, left yourself in cruise-control, dozed into your own darkness. In your rearview, you can remember glimpses, fading, falling away, further, further, further: mountains in Colorado, truck stops in Texas, call boxes in New Mexico.
Going 97 on I-95, hoping you crash.
Arrested in Louisiana.
Driving. Endlessly.
Nowhere to go.
It was a vague year—a year of shuttering wilderness and headlights; unraveling road; inconsolable restlessness.
New York hadn't crossed your mind yet, New York City, an impossible amount of daily motion, an indecipherable amount of daily darkness. It draws droves of runaways, you had heard, hoping to hide out in boiler rooms in Brooklyn. $575 monthly, you'd been told, for a moldy cavern of leaking, hissing pipes, snake-like shadows hovering in your sleep. Now, you're watching it grey over, brightening slowly, bruised by a sharp skyline. Everything is falling; light pollution poisoning any leftover remains of regret. Flares. When you look up, you're blinded by arcs of red-hot taillights in bumper-to-bumper traffic, inching forward to a toll booth.
Holland Tunnel looms.
You weren't a runaway, but you were close enough.
Down. Out.
You were living horizontally, upright in a Honda Civic, crashing at a Love's in Arizona or Ohio. You were night-tripping terror on I-40. Don Quixote. Windmills. You think you were losing yourself in funneling stretches of darkness: Midwest America. Freeways lit by glints, flickering flashes—reflections of traffic cones—following you. Nevada had been long and lightless. Wyoming had been high and hazy. Mountains. Deserts. Everywhere you looked, you knew.
Whatever you're running from, it will catch up.
It always does.
Every roadside cigarette you'd smoked, your door half-closed, orange dust mingling into grey wisps. Noises. Crickets. Parked behind a Taco Bell in Connecticut, a fringe of New England. Leaves quivering across your foggy windshield, reaching for you quietly. Everything catching up in an empty parking lot, knowing you're fucked: you're so lost you're nearly a ghost of yourself, so alone you could disappear.
It was a $9.50 toll for Holland Tunnel. You barely scraped it up. Clawing nickels, dimes, pennies from an old coffee container on your passenger seat floor—Folgers, Dad swore by. Horns blaring at a pulsing pace behind you, echoing; a strip of headlights unwinding in your side mirror. Vagueness, you'd learn, seeps in slowly, and you forget, you forget why you're here, what brought you here, here, here. Where did you come from? Why can't you remember?
Details dull. Details of your year On The Road, terrified of your own shadow, trying to outrun what you'd always known would catch up to you. It always does. Did Kerouac ever find America? Did Kerouac know what I know?
Sometimes, it's as if... it's happening to somebody else.
I keep forgetting it isn't.
Only I can tell it, I think. I want to explain why I left—for Dad and Mom, for Ollie, for Wes—but I can't fully explain it yet.
I don't know if I'll ever outrun it.
