Where the Sidewalk Ends

Wrinkled and abused rubber slipped along the glass, leaving a stubborn glossy film clinging to the windshield. Its octave ranging tones played soccer with air molecules in the rusted car.

A young woman held on to the wobbling steering wheel, leaning slightly forward against her flannel armor in an effort to gauge the location of the blurry asphalt her life depended upon. A sigh slipped out of her lips like a family secret and rested in a foggy resentment against the windshield.

Chipped hands ripped from the wheel made contact with the fog in an effort to clear the path. Clammy chills ran up her arm as she spread her fingerprints across the liquidized sigh. She pulled her hand back, clenching and unclenching it in an effort to ward off the dew. Her front tooth skated against the round of her thumbnail as she stared out the window and checked the rearview mirror who did nothing but smile back at her own reflection.

Her mind drifted back to that evening in the orchard. She had lodged herself between the trunk of an apple tree and its moss covered bough in an effort to hide from the world. Her wrinkleless hands hurriedly inked letters onto the back of topographic map paper, hoping fervently to drain her brain before the sun set its itinerary for the other hemisphere.

Only a few ticks lay between the car ride and the witching hour. She wasn’t ready to leave eighteen.

Her windshield wipers gave out with a squeal of expiration and lay protesting in the middle of her windshield. She closed her eyes for a second to get away from the halo of headlights behind her and pulled over to the semicircle of gravel that miraculously appears on country roads at uneven intervals.

The slash of the other cars tires vibrated the car in tune to the rain which kept up a steady song. Her fingers groped for the keys and pulled them out, severing the main artery to the engine.

Suddenly, it was just the rain and a girl. She leaned her seat back until it bumped into the second half of the car. And for the first time in a long time, she just

Breathed. Youth ran through her veins, transmitting from atom to atom. The past year floated back to her. Ripping out the Mad Scientist’s heart, leaving her skin a permanent note, taking one last stab at high school with a Lost Boy. Drunken mistakes near the shore, hours spent with just enough pages in a book to make enjoying dusk by herself on a country porch surreal, deciding to run north, getting there and realizing just how essential her mother was to the core of her being, loving Lovely no matter what his determinate and for the first time, having him love her back, realizing how young she was and how beautiful such youth made her in virgin actions towards growing up.

The car seemed warmer. Muscles gently twitched themselves upwards and a smile counteracted the ocean leaking one drop at a time out of eyelash umbrellas.

She woke up to find herself caught in a world of fogged up glass. The pictures she had drawn in past days smiled at her, telling her secrets of which boy smelled like Vermont leather and which girl smiled just a little differently.

She pulled up her seat until her eyes stared back at her once again from the mirror. Her fingers found the iced over keys and she breathed life back into the engine. Halos of headlight were nowhere to be seen, and she pulled back onto road after finding that her wipers had a little more strength in them.

And she went back to her world. Young, but just a little less so.

Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

Running to the north was the best thing I could have done.

Yes, I do find myself dying to run back home sometimes. I would kill for my dogs, and seeing my parents get back into that rental car to fly back to Rashka and the countless cousins and the humidity, I can't help but ache for Virginia.

Sometimes you never know how much you love a place until you can't wake up there anymore.

So many high school friends hate their schools. Godwin was their cocoon, and they were in their element there. I am just now realising how much of a blessing it was that I did not fit in to any degree.

Because here, I just click. The boy who comes up to print a paper is more than happy to sit and watch a rolling stones concert while rubbing that hippie back of mine. When I tell someone that the word coital reminds me of seashells, they smile and agree.

People wear what they want, think what they want, say what they feel.

No, it's not all sunshine and happiness. There are pretentious assholes here. cocaine and marijuana is around every corner, as is the idiot who only comes out of his drug den for cigarettes and occasional classes.

But for the first time, I feel pretty and worth something. People pay attention to me, my ideas and my body are not simply dismissed.

Stress and homesickness are a part of life. They add to the element of what I am giving up to truly learn who I am

because I have no idea what kind of person lies inside of me. In Virginia I would have followed the preassigned courses in math, science, friendship, marraige, and life.

There's no roadmap at this college. While all the other souls in their 18th year are freaking out because they haven't put all the pieces together,

I get giddy every time I think about how much I have ahead of me.

But tonight, I will fall asleep only knowing the yellowed pages of All the King's Men and the faint smell of Vermont leather resting on my skin.

And that makes everything just a little bit better.