Passenger Seat

I try to read as the truck rumbles along the highway on the eight-hour drive from Louisburg to Dallas. My inability to concentrate frustrates me; it is a particular problem at the moment. I read a page but cannot remember a word I’ve read, let alone process the information. Lupus picks at my brain and makes me forget things; makes it hard for me to keep track. Facts and phrases flit futilely in and out of my head. Little thought-mice scurrying around inside my mind, their little thought-claws struggling for a purchase in my brain. But lupus makes the surface slick; they just slide right off again. And I forget. I forget things from years ago, from last year, from yesterday. Little things—things someone told me; things I learned in class or on the radio. I sigh and rest my forehead on the cool glass of the car window and wish there was a way to explain to everyone that I am not really as air-headed as I can appear at times. I just have a rebel-brain, tossing back things that have been thrown at it. I shake my head, shake off the discouragement, and look out the window.

The steady motion lulls me into a sort of trance. Random thoughts begin to play just behind my forehead, vaguely spurred by the scenery.

“Janet’s”, reads the sign of a bakery we pass in a sad little town. My hazy thoughts begin to wander. The name “Janet” has always sounded crass to me, and sharp, like the sting of a yellow jacket on a hot July day, or when you’re chewing something crunchy and bite your tongue. A name you’d expect to find, I think, in this flat little town of Savannah, Oklahoma. This town with patched-up roads and ragged lawns, full of houses with peeling paint and blankets tacked up inside the windows with their air-conditioning units hanging lopsided from the sills. Little houses surrounded by chain link that separates the dogs from the bitches, the pit-bulls from the children. The children playing with their broken trucks in their cat-soiled sandboxes, passed over by the vacant eyes of adults in stained tank tops with cigarettes dangling from their slack, jaded lips.

Janet.

The name—the town—has a rusty bite that makes me morose. I see a girl in booty-shorts sitting on a weathered, sun-beaten wooden porch and I think of the splinters she will get beneath the skin that was meant to be covered, defeating the very purpose of clothing.

I’m glad we are only passing through, though the way I judge sends my gaze to the floorboards.

Small towns swell into big cities, which eventually give way to acres of empty pasture. We drive through them all, like moving through a timeline of the rhythm of my life. I seem to live in a series of ebbs and flows; mentally, emotionally, physically. The swelling and abating of everything, and whatever it is, I know its only a matter of time before it comes and goes again. I think I’m almost to a point of giving up forced structure; of letting myself live in a way that comes naturally to me. It takes a letting go of conscious control. It takes trusting oneself, and remaining impervious to the unspoken instructions of society. I am terrible at all of the above, but I don’t know how much longer I can fight against my natural bends, struggling to align with a predetermined grid pattern.

I know what needs to be done, in a way. I need to keep deepening the shadows of my life and brightening highlights, increasing the contrast with hints of color and line. I could make something of my own, I think, something lacking a particular pattern but still somehow, inexplicably, making sense to me.

But, like most of my art projects, that will take time. Much longer than this drive from Louisburg to Dallas.

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