Lightbulbs & Sad Country

The road from Memphis to California is longer than I thought. I realized this while trying to figure out whether or not we could make it across the country with less than two hundred dollars; the amount we had between us. Anything would be better than these fluorescent lights, she said. They hummed and radiated, surely having adverse effects on our health. Not that I care that much about my health; not day to day at least. Long term I consider it pretty important, but today the only vegetables I ate were tomatoes on a sandwich. I will go to the gym tomorrow. But I will also drink a six pack before dinner, while listening to sad country music: A Friday tradition. This started as a nod to irony, but I am starting to get it too much for my liking. What if I turn into the singer whose dog followed his wife when she left him because he started drinking again when the factory closed down?

She’d always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, she tells me as we stare at the map before us, knowing that our plan to run away is not in earnest. Instead, she pulls up videos of cats to distract herself even further and I imagine her arm out the window, feet on the dashboard as we get lost somewhere in Colorado. I’ve never been that far west before. The wind fires through her hair, as she smiles at me at seventy-five miles per hour. We’ll make it to California eventually, where I can release her back into the wild. She belongs out there.

In the end, the buzzing of the printers around us drag me out of the driver’s seat and back into this uncomfortable wooden desk chair. I will sit here, reveling in music that sounds like sadness and a slab of rock, and hope that I can see the Grand Canyon one day. Chances are she won’t be with me, but I will think of her. She belongs out there, where there is sun and not fluorescent lightbulbs. Where things are beautiful and mysterious, and the trees are taller than God.