FRAGMENTS

A short story about leaving and how much it sucks.

My face is up against the cold glass as the sun shines through the late July trees. The tires are humming to the microscopic bumps in the road, the wheeze of the air conditioner in on full blast, and my parents are talking but I’m not listening. As I blink, it feels like I miss out on part of the journey home, like speakers cutting out. I blink again and realize I am in a new place, must have fallen asleep. I look around the cheap plastic interior of my father’s car and notice it has only been twenty minutes since we’ve left, however those twenty minutes had felt like the longest in my life.

I keep playing the events of the last month over and over again in my head. I get flashes of the lake with the bluest water I can imagine, the smoke stacks emitting toxins into the rich orange summer sky. The sun hits the smoke hard, showing how disgusting it is, yet still having some dark beauty to it. Or the strangely empty campus which had only sixty or so people on it at a given time .The small laundry room which smelled like the dryer sheets you have come to love, the sound of the clothes rumbling in the small metal boxes, almost like a waltz. The long brown hair of the girl that you’ve been falling more and more in love with being caught in the seven o’ clock sunset. And that overwhelmingly hypnotic sound of the waves crashing up against the rocky shoreline as you begin to fall asleep. You exhale and relax. You can’t help but have that creeping feeling that you’re finally a part of something greater than yourself.

The car hits a bump in the road, the entire car shakes and I’m pulled out of the intoxicating fog I had created in my head. It was like someone broke through the breastbone and injected the adrenaline to kickstart my heart.

It seems that we only do two things in our lives. We’re either are looking forwards or looking backwards. I seem to be eternally nostalgic, ignoring the bad and remembering the good. The past is just a story that we keep retelling ourselves, we can edit, reposition, exaggerate, distort. Sometimes we make the past so incredibly perfect that it can be hard to compare to where we are now. The past seems to have the warm colors of kodachrome while the present seems to feel all too real.

As we continue south, the sun begins to set. The light becomes more and more golden. The shadows of the trees reach across more of the tarmac the father we go. Then, before I can process it, the sun has set and the day is gone. I don’t remember much more of the trip back home. The only thing I can recall is walking into my house and feeling like I’ve never seen it before, feeling like it isn’t mine. Feeling like I don’t belong.