Mar 9

car wheels on a glonging road

scorsby's in the car again. he doesn't remember getting in. the road ahead is the color of old tin, and the fields on either side are the particular gold of late afternoon in a month he can't quite name. he is going somewhere. or he has just come from somewhere. the distinction feels less important than the hum of the wheels, which is steady, the steadiest thing he knows.

the radio finds a frequency and holds it. someone's singing in a language he doesn't speak, but the feeling of the song is clear — it's about longing, or arrival, or the way these two things are sometimes the same. scorsby turns it up a little. the fields keep passing. the road keeps offering itself.

scorsby thinks: i am one thing moving through many things.

scorsby thinks: i am many things that have temporarily agreed to be one.

the car doesn't care which. the wheels turn either way.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

at some point there's a town. scorsby stops for gas and the man at the counter has a face scorsby is certain he's seen before, though he can't say where. the man hands him change and their fingers almost touch and scorsby feels, briefly, the whole weight of this guy's particular life — the early mornings, the small aches, the someone he's going home to or not going home to — and then it passes, the way everything passes, and scorsby's back in the car with a paper cup of something cool and the road starting again outside the windscreen.

he thinks about a pal he once knew. she appears in his mind not as a whole person but a series of instants — the way she laughed at something he said before he finished saying it, the exact specific weight of her silence the last time they spoke. she's not here. she hasn't been here for a long time. and yet she is somehow still in the car, the way certain songs stay in a room after the radio has been switched off.

scorsby lets her be there.

he doesn't try to make her leave, and he doesn't try to make her stay. the road accepts this. the fields accept this. the light, which is changing now, moving from gold toward something more ambiguous, accepts this completely.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

there's a moment — he can't say when, exactly — when the self thins. it doesn't disappear. it simply becomes less insistent. the edges of scorsby soften into the edges of the seat, the seat into the car, the car into the road, the road into the land it crosses. he's not gone. he's simply — distributed. present in more places than just the one behind his eyes.

in this state he can feel the other cars on other roads, the ones he'll never see, moving in their own directions, each containing someone also moving between one thing and another thing, also carrying a specific face they can't quite put down, also listening to something on the radio that is almost what they needed to hear. all of them are scorsby. none of them are scorsby. both are true at once and the road doesn't ask him to choose.

here it is, he thinks, or perhaps the thought thinks him. this is what it feels like.

and then: a car passes going the other direction, close enough that for a fraction of a second he sees the driver's face — a man, middle-aged, slightly tired, looking straight ahead — and the distribution reverses, contracts, and scorsby is suddenly and completely himself again, here, in this seat, on this particular road, with this particular cup of something warming in the holder beside him and the memory of that pal still quietly present in the passenger seat.

the two states have exchanged themselves so smoothly he cannot say there was a seam.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎

the road begins to look familiar. not familiar in the way of a place he's been before, but familiar in the way of something that's been with him for as long as he can remember, which is maybe the same thing. the fields are the same color they were when he started. the light's returned to late afternoon. the radio finds a frequency and holds it — someone singing in a language he doesn't speak, the feeling of the song clear as water.

scorsby thinks: i have been here before.

scorsby thinks: here has been me before.

he turns the radio up a little. outside, the fields keep offering themselves. the road keeps arriving under the wheels, which turn, which have always been turning, which will keep turning through every version of this — through the long amber afternoons between, through every face in every passing car, through every ghost in every passenger seat, through every town where a man with a familiar face hands back change and their fingers almost touch.

❤︎ ❤︎ ❤︎