other side of the map so that even I can’t see them. And if I don’t see them, how
will you?
Here’s what I have seen: after I got lost yesterday I signed the papers to
sell Mom’s house. I thought you should know. The people who bought it seem
like they would have been her kind of people, even if they aren’t keeping the
tire swing. Or the oak the tire swing hangs on, when it comes to it. They don’t
have children, but our room will make a nice office. I would have liked to say I
would have liked you there, but I am aware that, even now, there are things you
will choose whether or not to understand. The burden of practicality is mine. I
gave up on sharing it with you long before you retreated to the coast, leaving me
behind with the damages.
I have tried to understand the steady state of unmovable things.
I do carry maps in the glove box, just in case the GPS goes out. Yesterday I
realized they aren’t maps from here, but from the places we’ve been together. Idling
in a brick driveway, staring headfirst into a vaulted entryway, I went through the lot
of them. Jason left a highlighter in the car along with his history book—a class he is
failing, if in third grade failure is possible—and, with the delicate skins of the maps
spread out against the book and the steering wheel, I marked all the roads I could
remember in yellow from all the places I had ever been, with or without you.
Did you realize how connected it all is? All these streets running through
different landscapes and under different names but the road is still the road,
underneath all of that, and maybe in the end there is really only one. Arterial routes
and highways running state to state until they hit the ocean and turn around on
themselves. So in some ways I suppose we’re driving on the same pavement, for all
the space you have put in between.