He speaks to me from miles and miles away through a phone.   From interstate highways spanning off Route 69 to pothole-riddled city streets to structured two-lanes of suburbia to winding country backways.  He moves at an average of 70 miles per hour through the Midwest, driven to drive this daunting journey across America’s geographical face.  He looks out his window and does not see the Maryland green of elder oaks and birch and ash that had embraced painted Iroquois and tight-mouth Protestant pilgrims and frightened runaway slaves in its cool shade.  Instead, he gazes out into flat prairie lands and cavernous rock formations and dry dessert.

When he ends his travels, he will be on another coast looking out over another ocean and another life.  And will he ease back into that old life he left four years ago like a slip of old skin?   Or will he falter, halt, and take a look over his shoulder, sadly remembering another life in another coast looking over another ocean?  Another life that included an overly cautious girl that learned to take risks without fear and to live without care.  Will he remember slow dancing in a street corner to an amateur jazz musician, watching catamarans bobbing like toy ships on the Severn River, or ambling through the city hand-in-hand with a careless wonder of the night?

Will he remember me, as I remember him?  California boy who smiles too easily and drinks too frequently?  A verbal sparring partner who will stubbornly declare that the sky is green and persist like a tenacious bulldog with his bone, until you also begin to believe that why yes, the sky is a grass green.  A secretly soft-hearted person who is quick to try to make me smile, to take me to Starbucks, and to kiss away tears.

I will remember the day he left.  The few moments when I could not seem to get up from the grassy hill to give him one last hug of good-bye, one last kiss of farewell.   And when he knelt down to take touch my forehead with his, clasp my trembling shoulders in his hands, he promised he would come back.  There was a great sadness in his eyes, but a weary conviction too, of his intended journey home elsewhere.  And how I shook and cried when I hugged him tightly, as if I squeezed hard enough he would change his mind.  And of course, he didn’t.  I watched him drive away from my life in a white Durango with a busted left taillight, driving onto Route 32 to another home far away from me.

The hardest part of leaving is being left.  I stay here and walk the same streets, travel the same areas.  Ghosts of memories linger in the corners of my tiny world, of a small hometown and surrounding cities.  I look out into the old nooks and crannies previously visited and feel a twinge of pain of a bandage being pulled from a fresh wound.

I hope he travels far. I hope he travels to that distant shore of his family and home.  And then… I hope he travels back to me.

When you’re young, everyone wants to give you advice.  From well-meaning intentions of a friend while you’re bullshitting around hanging out to wise counseling of a parent who has sat you down for a heart-to-heart about your future to careless remarks of a stranger who sat next to you at a bar that you’ll never meet again, but for this night and this moment, you’re the best of friends.  Everyone wants to impart to you their pearls of wisdom, and while most them ring true, one of the best pieces of advice I had ever been given, and have listened to, is this: Travel.  Travel for the experience.  Travel to broaden your horizons.  Travel to meet new people and to learn something new.  About yourself, about others, about life.  You grow with each new experience, and hopefully, come to realize that life is bigger than the 9 to 5 day job you have, the corners of the hometown you know so well, and the people that you have seen all your life.  There is a whole world out there waiting; beckoning with the crook of the road and wink of the sinking sun.   

Have you ever looked back at your past relationships, seeing them as a winding trail that has led you to this point in your life?  Like connecting the dots on a kids coloring book.  Or like a trail of breadcrumbs, a vintage-heeled Asian Gretel trekking her way out of the black forest and into the clearing.

What has this journey taught you?  Lessons of what you are worth and what you deserve?  Heartaches are excellent teachers in self-realizations.  Each failed relationship is a dot, a breadcrumb, a freakin marker to continue the journey.  Then you stop in mid-step – and take a look around at where you are.  Another boy, another relationship.  And you ask yourself, is it worth it?  And a tiny voice whispers, I don’t know.  The uncertainty makes you stumble, a trip-tropping mess onto a dirt side-path.  Away from what you know and what is.  Because the truth is that the book of lessons you’ve accumulated in life can be erased from memory with one enticing smile.

I am a mess of the cognitive kind.

Prissy type A personality functioning on stability and structure.  I flounder in the face of change.  I operate on schedules.  Without those layouts of weeks, months, years I am an unmasted ship aimlessly coasting the waters into the unknown where peg-legged pirates write the phrase ‘here there be monsters’ with flourish.

Pageant princess of cognitive dissonance: I picture that conflicting discomfort of unaligned thoughts and actions as vibrating atoms of energy laced with coke.  Or ricocheting bullets, and each contact rips off a piece of my insides.

It is only when you are lost that you find yourself.  I don’t even know who the hell said that, but I am looking for answers.  Into the spring night I wandered, the aimless driving of one who hopes to stumble upon answers.  If only they were that tangible -- raised parts of sidewalk pavement, interrupting my stride as they catch the foot of worn sneakers to announce their presence.  If only.  Or a trail like Hansel’s path of white stone, leading him and his sister back home.  If only.  Then again, Hansel should have been aware of the local wildlife the second time he tried with breadcrumbs.

Am I looking for answers or am I running away?  Sometimes the two can be mistaken for the other.  As I look through the windshield at that wide expanse of road, silver-gilded in moonlight snaking through the desolate hills of Howard County, I am tempted to seize that gift of freedom, that idea of possibility, in the smooth curve of the wheel and just go.  Seize that clichéd ride into the sunset to take you far from everything that you know.  Faster.  Away from the miasma of uncertainty and failure.  Faster.  Until the world I see is one that I do not recognize.

I am torn: do I look for a fix or do I run?.