but perilous

The trunk was packed tight with our scattered clothes, leftover messages of these wasted years. At some point she’d picked up a little mirror with sea shells glued on to it. They were falling off now, gifts scattered on the side of the road leading lost poets home to Bethlehem. I left a note on one: “I send you this, who left the blue veins of your throat unkissed."

I couldn’t even tell you how long we’d been moving. Time had been standing still for what felt like a decade, but we would swear to you that we were barely 23. Maybe we were inching through our thirties. Maybe it was time I shaved and planted a garden in a little fenced in yard surrounded by something concrete.

Our travels were just a show. One long ordeal with different backgrounds, but always the same. The motel in Tulsa looked like the one in Santa Monica. In Michigan there was snow and the heater broke; in Texas there was grassland and the air conditioner broke.

I blanked out most of the journey, barely awake to the fact that I was making my way around the entire continental United States. We drove from one mountain range to the other, slept on beaches in silent freedom. I must have been asleep at the wheel when we pulled into Memphis, murmuring softly, “I should have thought in a dream you would have brought some lovely, perilous thing.”

This whole journey started in Cleveland, our first outing into the real world. She was a pretty thing with a pretty head a hair, standing by the bathroom sink in her underwear saying, “One day, we’ll discover America.”

Maybe one day we would. Maybe, at the end of the journey, after our weathered bags were tucked away in closets, covered in place names unrecognizable. Maybe then we would find America among the seashells.