SAVOR THE ROAD

 [Continuing]

I once read a story about a man who wrote a story that could be read forward or back and tell the very same thing.

… From the spiral-bound notebook

All the way home he listened to the Steve Miller band while driving between 80 and 90 mph in the Subaru. He drank a blonde, tall from Starbucks coffee, black with a Bacon and Gruyere egg puff which he ate like a muffin, two bights each along with a fairly moist chocolate chip scone.

He listened to Jet Airliner, setting the volume to 34 on the sound system which was rattling the seats and each of his ribs as he sang every word.

He felt relieved and open about how things were apparently unfolding for he and Laura now. What on earth?

And I just don't know… I just don't… turned over and over prayerfully as he began much work on complicating an otherwise perfectly simple and budding deep friendship.

The freeway, however, was wide open and he left the windows open wide. He turned words in his mind and on the road he drove the road on in his mind, where words turned over and over the freeway, and it was all nothing but breathing onward and in and out on the highway by way of grace that was travel and speed and utter freedom. He drove heaven in heaven, observing his bliss and renewing his soul on the highway in flight.

Give it a marble gigantic.

Give it a blue sky painted broader than sight.

People it with storys-high, brave detonations of cloud ascending.

Fly a jet plane through it. No really. Do it.

He pressed the pedal to the floor, fueled up on coffee with a gulp.

Big old jet airliner, Don't carry me too far away

Big old jet airliner, cause it's here that I got to stay

She simply must've torn them out and stuffed them away to keep them for herself. Why should it even bother me? I wrote the words, it's not as though those specific quotes are so long I don't carry them with me somehow automatically in my mind. She will have them. If I want them I know who to ask. It will be okay.

Zoe kept drinking her milk from her dish without even turning to acknowledge him.

He wasn't going to be the first one to call, that's for sure. He watered the plants and got groceries and checked back in with the newspaper and would run over the next evening to pick up the Honda from the shop and get things running again with Uber.

Home was nice. He shook his head a lot.

He missed her.