The Longest Day
The car was packed with just enough clothing and necessities for a short weekend, a box of gifts and the heavy scent of anticipation. “What is the purpose of your trip?” the rental assistant had asked. It was a valid question and as yet unanswered. “Personal” was the only adequate response.
In her scrupulous preparations for resolution she had written two documents: the first was her imagined wedding vows to a woman who could see no further than the brink of her anxiety; the second was a letter of release. With honest regret she had only packed the latter in an envelope marked “Open in Case of Emergency.”
The house was bathed in the dark of the new moon, and amid the clutter she could feel her daughter sleeping restlessly. She knew she would be bruised with small footprints in the morning, but had resigned herself to the consolation of company to occupy the side of the bed where she would no longer sleep.
To ease her mind she ran through the litany of practicalities, rifling papers and checking her courier bag one more time. At last she dialed, looking to confirm one conscious detail and to settle the dread that had taken root in her stomach.
“Hello…” It was the raspy downward inflection that she had come to recognize as preëmptive deflection of guilt. “How are you?” Her sincere reply was met with a wash of distress, recounting ailments both physical and social, accumulated into an unbearable burden.
Two hours later she hung up the phone and collapsed into her chair. Her grief mixed with the anger she felt at having been forced to make a choice that was not her own. The open envelope seemed paltry evidence of the magnitude of its contents, which had been met with relief and sudden nausea.
“You understand. You get me.”
“Yes, I get you. And I love you.”
“I know, and I want to say it too. But do you know how empty that would sound right now?”
“No, it really wouldn’t! In fact, it would help a lot.”
She hadn’t meant to raise her voice, but her exasperation at the waste before her could no longer be contained. The conversation had ended five minutes later with no further words said than “goodbye.”
___________
It had been years since she had owned a car, and the freedom she felt flying down the highway had warmed her along with the blaring solstice sun. Her daughter had stayed awake long enough to sing one chorus of Route 66 as they entered Virginia and then slipped into the fullness of sleep. It had been nine years since the last time she had made this trip: a day that she would always remember as the epitome of her individual joy and her power to create her own experiences.
On that April morning she had simply decided “I’m going to Shenandoah today.” The bright Philadelphia skyline had glittered blue in the rearview mirror as she set out with a backpack, a map and such provisions as could be afforded by the A-Plus convenience store. Having stopped to smell the metaphorical roses of a small museum and a rural diner she had pulled into the park at 11:00 pm. The gates were locked against trespassers who would deign to travel the Skyline Drive without paying the hefty price for the privilege. So she sat on the scrap of lawn in front of the toll-booth, in a thicket of unconcerned deer.
The smell of their grassy sweat still hung on her clothing an hour later, in awkward contrast with the muted motel stench. She had never trusted rented rooms that were decorated solely in brown. That night she had no dreams, but awoke with a lingering sense of a deep and expansive black.
The morning was heating up quickly, shedding the chilled country air with surprising haste. She had been considering removing herself from the now uncomfortable cement stoop when a small red car had passed. It was the first human sign she had seen since her awkward encounter with the elderly desk clerk the night before. Apparently, single white women did not check into motels at midnight without the benefit of disdain.
Still she had been surprised when the red car had doubled back, stopping on the highway in front of her room, and a male face had leaned out to inquire “Are you working?” His drawl was smug and hostile, and she suddenly wished she had worn a t-shirt under her strappy blue knit dress with the sunflowers. Clothing herself in a cloud of cigarette smoke she took a moment to answer “No, I’m on vacation.” As she stared at the retreating license plate her face burned with the realization of her unintended confession.
Her uneasiness had subsided as she had entered the park, at last bathed in the dappled shadows of old growth. She was more sensibly clad in overalls covering an ancient concert t-shirt, now held together only by threads of nostalgia. In her backpack she carried a gallon of water, two novels, a diary and her grandfather’s pocket knife, to cut the sausage, cheese and bread she had purchased that morning. She had been shocked by the ham hocks and the full aisle of beer and liquor under the distant fluorescent lights. Although she had driven for eight hours it occurred to her that she had traveled farther than she had intended. Safely removed from the Kroeger’s, her world once more made sense. Her feet rejoiced in their heavy boots, bouncing off the dirt path against the weight of the mountain below.
___________
She was an experienced hiker, having stretched her limbs across the gulf of adolescence on an upstate New York farm. She owned a full first aid kit, could identify the wild mushrooms that were safe to eat and could walk twenty miles in a day with pleasant satisfaction. A self-defined woodland creature, she had always felt more at home in a copse than a community. She had wandered from the path and been rewarded with a lush landscape cut by a crashing waterfall into the river below. Her lungs swelled with contentment and the crisp spray coated the inside of her nose and the corners of her eyes as she stared down the cliff face. She had settled onto the living rock with a novel in her lap, taking care to put extra sunscreen on her face and the back of her neck.
She tried to enter into the novel, but was acutely self-conscious of the memory she was creating, feeling the heaviness of her own presence in that moment. At the same time she felt the visceral return of an experience where one year before she had sat on the edge of a mountain stream in Aviemore, self-consciously enjoying Arthurian drama while nestled in the Scottish heath. These self-reflections turned in upon themselves creating a fractal sense of self in which she was always in a moment, remembering a moment of feeling a moment, remembering the feeling of another moment before. She had a sudden ache to let herself fall down that spiral string in quest for the original sensation from which all these moments of contrived authenticity derived, to pick apart the waft of her life’s tapestry and confront the common thread laid bare in her hands.
She knew that to pull this thread into the light would require the abdication of the picture she had created for herself, the renunciation of the narrative she had so proudly displayed to the world. Yet it was beginning to dawn upon her that the execution of the craft with which she had created the fabric of her life’s tale did not serve the art with which she must live it. If she was to allow herself to fall either backwards into her source, or forwards into her potential, she must turn from the seduction of believing her own story. She must allow herself to unravel into the darkness and thread a new pattern into each dawn. She would create instead an art without history or expectation, always calling joy into the world and waiting for its echoing return.
___________
Having spent the three hour drive reviewing the cinematic progression of her memories, the sound of wheels crunching gravel as she pulled into the campsite seemed ridiculously predictable: so much so that she laughed out loud. Hearing herself laugh, she laughed a second time, that she should find the mundane so absurd, and then a third time with the absurdity of laughing at her own sense of the absurd. Entwined in such recursive amusement, her laughter bubbled forth into the evening and bounced off the assembled cars, trucks, decrepit outbuildings and the surrounding verdant wood. It woke her daughter, who was slumped over the arm of her booster seat. Her child’s squinted eyelids carried the weight of recent sleep and puckered as she strained to see her unfamiliar surroundings. In a concerned voice her daughter asked “Mommy, are we here yet?”
She took her daughter’s hand, beaming into her child’s expectant face, and said “Yes dear, always.”
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