One Word times three: Cosmic, Reveal, and Sorry
Not following any rules here
It was night time. The hardest time to get a ride and she was hitching alone. People talked about it being dangerous but she had never met anything but nice folks. How else were you supposed to get around when you didn’t own a car? She didn’t want to ask someone to take her places. She might not have a car but she worked and she walked and lived her life the way she wanted. It was kind of lonely not having anyone to answer to, but freeing too.
~~~**~~~
Out here in the dark walking for miles with no noise, just tingling cold starlight, there was nothing but time to think. A dialogue between myself and well, myself. Time to roam the halls of my thoughts, wondering and wandering. That’s probably why I don’t mind this walking. So much to think about, to know. Why are people the way they are? Why am I the way I am?
Being alone was easier. No awkwardness. No one asking me where I have wandered off to. Sometimes this other life, this internal journey, is a flight, no wings needed. Other times, it haunts me and weighs me down, chained from somewhere deep in my chest, all the way to the center of a layer of rock below the surface of the earth. Is it possible to live with my head in the clouds but keep my feet planted on the ground? Mama said I was a dreamer. It wasn’t a compliment, but I wonder why? I think the world needs more dreamers. So far my feet aren’t impressed with the ground.
Mama doesn’t know everything about me. It’s my heavy, weighty secret that she doesn’t know. The truth about what’s in my soul. Mama always does the right thing. I spend most of my time trying to figure out what the right thing is. How does she always know? I’m sorry mama. Did I miss something in the great cosmic factory where I was built? Something that is supposed to be hardwired in, left out as I passed by on the assembly line? How did I get past inspector 38? No tag to cut off under penalty of law?
Headlights shining through the blowing snow from behind me. Maybe my walking is through for the night, The car slows and pulls over just ahead. The dome light reveals a guy and his girlfriend, probably on their way home from a date. I climb in the back seat and she turns to ask me where I’m heading. Just a few miles ahead I say. Right by the Sunoco station would be fine. The heater is blowing warm air that makes my fingers and toes hurt. The radio is playing a Stones song. The guy asks me what I’m doing way out here. Just going home I tell him. Just going home. “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”
Well now Dee, you’ve got me conditioned. First I read “She’s Going Home†and I waited for Loverboy to blast through the door, “Well, lookee here! Where you think you’re goin’, Chicky?†Then I read “The Cheese Stands Alone†and I waited to be shocked, maybe by the father’s response. And finally, I read “Hitchin,†and thought surely the car girl who turns around, her face will be all bone with only a few scraps of bloody flesh hanging from it and her eyes will be nothing but hollow sockets in which worms writhe, making sucking noises. There was none of that. There was subtlety, portraiture, cross-sections of people’s lives. And my shocked reactions turned out to be the kickers! 😉
oooh that’s almost as good as cheesecake. I’m thinking that it’s a good thing, to be able to surprise you – and a good thing to have a life that surprises me. How boring it would be to feel the same all the time, and how boring to write the same all the time. I’m going to celebrate!
I have to confess to the conditioning, too, Ms Dee: your fictionista does have her diabolical sides. I like the floating consciousness of these hitchers, whisperings of Michigan nights gone by, no doubt, but the car and its passengers did give me pause. The Stones song did lay down its possible ironies and I was feeling for the girl: just what did those folks in the car need?