10.15.00

I only want to be home or as far away as possible. So, envious of your travels, I took the opportunity to go too, if only for a day and night. I went to Portland for a baby shower on short notice. I rented a car—I rented a small car, though a furrowed brow over low neckline and silken skirt got me an upgrade to a shiny black V6. The drive to Portland and the shower are inconsequential. These passages were only conditions to meet before I could go—vegetables before dessert. And by 4pm when the gifts were long opened and lunch paid for, I asked them which road goes to the ocean and that was all. What is amazing is the feeling of total safety traveling over the earth when only I know where I am and no one senses my absence nor expects me to appear. Something about that is incredibly freeing. All thoughts of other people banished from mind and body. Though they carry on at the soul, dramatically, that dimension lacks the quality of time. And suddenly I'm driving under the lip of an orange sherbet cup toward the tallest bridge I know and the wide flat river that has always scared me. These parts are largely unknown but the map is imparted vaguely through the roots underfoot. I'm listening to music I know you would like. When the sun to the left slipped below the tops of the trees, I parked the car on the sand, got out, and ran after it to the shore waiting while the dampening light lapped at my feet. When it went it took the shore with it and the air turned the colors of the deep ocean. I picked grass and flower and wrote in the dark. Back in the car, plowing the night with light, alone. Off to the north the horizon glowed and at first I thought the night was just so black the light was some small town's embellished industry. But moments later, the way ever blacker and humanity recessed into it, the road turned north and there, beaming back at me was the moon, oh the incredible flat moon orange as the pumpkins ripe in the fields. Big as my fist and just beyond its reach. Tonight it was the larger one, promoted to star and all the gravity transferred to it. Hints of trees and buildings, abrupt mountains of Yunnan, the sheet of moisture soaring above the Indian ocean all sped by but it, the moon, hung fixed like a holy city and I a desperate pilgrim to it. Did you see it too? Were you traveling or standing, watching through glass or sucking it into you via the air? I wondered. Was it the same color or suited for that locality? Wherever you were when the moon rose, I imagine you were traveling in the same direction I was.

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