10 years ago today, I loaded up a motorcycle and a girl in my new black truck and drove across the country for a 6 month opportunity.
6 months became 12.
12 became 18.
And 18 became innumerable. The months stretched on, and the motorcycle and the relationship both ended at their respective crash sites. I found more… and I kept crashing those, too.
Today, and every year for weeks around this anniversary, I pay special attention to those memories. I reach out to the friends who said goodbye to me that day; tears spilling down to run over chapped lips in the Arizona desert sun. I remember the salt of it.
This year, I bought am loading another motorcycle in the same truck. Where the old bike was blue, things are now black and red. Where things were once shiny, they are now battered and bruised; no longer new… we have that in common. It seems to fit better. Today, I’m alone, but it’s probably better for adventures on days like this. Easier to dwell on things… to remember.
I remember the hours driving across the country. The tastes of new and strange food on our lips and tales of adventure in our mouths. I remember the columns of trees lining the roads, our silent witnesses as we slept in a farmhouse in Tennessee named for a particularly violent local family.
The trees in this part of Texas line the sides of the road as well. I drive the whole afternoon with all the windows open. No one’s hair to muss but mine. The trees and the miles take me back. I smell the forests, again.
Things are wet here. The splashes of color even carry moisture that the Arizona desert never could. Color only brought in rare moments, or from the denizens thereof. My mind spirals away unsafely from the road before me. To the orange juice of lost mornings. To the waterwheel and stone at the end of that long road… and farther still; to the zinfandel and lipstick at the beginning of it.
Days like today are important. They carry your past for you. You need not hold all of these decisions every moment for you would surely collapse. Days like this wait patiently, and they encircle you, taking you to a place of remembrance. Taking you to a place of worship and honoring the moments that built you.
There are so many things in the rear view. There is a reason that the word “reflection” can mean so many things. Today, among them is a new motorcycle. Hopefully with it, new promises. Maybe ones that I will keep this time.
