She takes a deep breath slowly and holds it for several seconds before exhaling slowly. She’s rarely aware of doing it, an unconscious attempt at clearing her mind, encouraging her body to reboot with the clean wash of oxygen. After a month of yoga classes, she lost interest and took up the old habit of sleeping until 9 a.m., but the cleansing deep breaths stuck with her.
Thirty minutes into the exam and she’s hit a roadblock. Elbows on the table, she leans her head against her left hand. Long blonde hair sweeping past her shoulders like a curtain, she stares at the test in sudden bewilderment.
The first page of the exam was easy enough. Multiple choice questions were simple to solve. The second page was short answer questions, her neat loopy handwriting started out in easy-to-read print and sloped to cursive as her hand grew careless across the page. It was the third and final page that had her stumped.
She stares at the question, reading and rereading until she no longer sees the question. She no longer sees the test. On the brink on frustrated tears, she sits up straight, pushing her hair away from her face. Resolving to remember the details of what she’d spent hours studying, she takes another slow deep breath. One. Two. Three. Pencil in hand, elbow on table, hand to paper, she writes her answer while breathing slow and steady.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
The road is my home
This isn't really for the assignment. This is something else.
The wheels of the truck rumble under his feet, a steady, relentless hum that he doesn’t even recognize as noise anymore. The world is dark outside the illumination of his headlights, but he doesn’t need to see it to know what’s there. Ditches, drainage pipes, fields of crops, the occasional billboard; those details he can fill in mentally. The dark focuses his attention. It’s just road; it’s just lights; it’s just him and the wheels turning round. He’s always like driving at night. He’s never thought of himself as a thinker of higher things, but over the years he’s discovered a pure and simple pleasure in the potency of driving alone with his thoughts at night.
With hours stretched before him at the wheel, he even ponders time itself. He knows that one can spend hours on the road, hardly aware of time passing. Long haul truck drivers mark miles, not minutes. Frequently hours pass without event, without a way to mark the time, so for the sake of your sanity, you stop paying attention to the numbers glowing above the radio. But you have to turn that attention somewhere, spacing out entirely will ease you to sleep quicker than you’d believe and in big trouble soon after. Sleepiness is the arch-enemy of the night driver; easy slumber is elusive during the day when it’s ‘time’ to sleep and your unwelcome companion in the driver’s seat.
Luckily, he doesn’t feel the pull of sleep tonight. Tonight, his memories are like a well-loved book he can open at random and revel in. The solid white line on the right side of the road is his boundary. He can feel the gravity of the road, anchoring him safe and sure to his allotted space. The road and the driver have grown to trust each other in the hours upon hours they have spent together. Now it holds him steady between the solid and dashed lines. The road curves… he doesn’t even think about it. His hands on the wheel, automatic and sure. Driving like this is sublime, a positive feedback loop he navigates in an eighteen wheeler. He smiles as he selects a jewel from his treasure chest of memory and loses himself to the past.
Through the haze of memory, he realizes that things look different. The sky is a slightly different shade of black than it was before. Then he can see just a little better. He notices the fake wood trim of the dashboard, the bright orange plastic on the gear shift, empty coffee cups. He watches as the scenery outside the truck slowly comes into focus. Trees, wildflowers, foxes bounding through the tall grass and away. The sun rises slowly and suddenly. Pouring itself up and over the edge of the earth with such powerful slowness that he thinks he might be dreaming. Leaving his memories is like waking up from a long sleep. Quiet and contemplative, but also ready for the sunlight and the chance of conversation that daytime brings. Despite his efforts not to, he stares at the sun rising until all he sees is the negative image of the huge burning star superimposed on the highway.
He breaks the silence and asks himself with a smile, “Well, how am I supposed to watch the road when the sun is doing that?”
The wheels of the truck rumble under his feet, a steady, relentless hum that he doesn’t even recognize as noise anymore. The world is dark outside the illumination of his headlights, but he doesn’t need to see it to know what’s there. Ditches, drainage pipes, fields of crops, the occasional billboard; those details he can fill in mentally. The dark focuses his attention. It’s just road; it’s just lights; it’s just him and the wheels turning round. He’s always like driving at night. He’s never thought of himself as a thinker of higher things, but over the years he’s discovered a pure and simple pleasure in the potency of driving alone with his thoughts at night.
With hours stretched before him at the wheel, he even ponders time itself. He knows that one can spend hours on the road, hardly aware of time passing. Long haul truck drivers mark miles, not minutes. Frequently hours pass without event, without a way to mark the time, so for the sake of your sanity, you stop paying attention to the numbers glowing above the radio. But you have to turn that attention somewhere, spacing out entirely will ease you to sleep quicker than you’d believe and in big trouble soon after. Sleepiness is the arch-enemy of the night driver; easy slumber is elusive during the day when it’s ‘time’ to sleep and your unwelcome companion in the driver’s seat.
Luckily, he doesn’t feel the pull of sleep tonight. Tonight, his memories are like a well-loved book he can open at random and revel in. The solid white line on the right side of the road is his boundary. He can feel the gravity of the road, anchoring him safe and sure to his allotted space. The road and the driver have grown to trust each other in the hours upon hours they have spent together. Now it holds him steady between the solid and dashed lines. The road curves… he doesn’t even think about it. His hands on the wheel, automatic and sure. Driving like this is sublime, a positive feedback loop he navigates in an eighteen wheeler. He smiles as he selects a jewel from his treasure chest of memory and loses himself to the past.
Through the haze of memory, he realizes that things look different. The sky is a slightly different shade of black than it was before. Then he can see just a little better. He notices the fake wood trim of the dashboard, the bright orange plastic on the gear shift, empty coffee cups. He watches as the scenery outside the truck slowly comes into focus. Trees, wildflowers, foxes bounding through the tall grass and away. The sun rises slowly and suddenly. Pouring itself up and over the edge of the earth with such powerful slowness that he thinks he might be dreaming. Leaving his memories is like waking up from a long sleep. Quiet and contemplative, but also ready for the sunlight and the chance of conversation that daytime brings. Despite his efforts not to, he stares at the sun rising until all he sees is the negative image of the huge burning star superimposed on the highway.
He breaks the silence and asks himself with a smile, “Well, how am I supposed to watch the road when the sun is doing that?”
Thursday, September 4, 2008
where we're going, we don't need umbrellas
The rain has almost stopped now. On this unusually calm afternoon, the water seems to just hang in the air. More mist than fog, it restricts vision all the same. Through the haze, a man walks down a sidewalk. Dressed for the weather, not the calendar in his khaki trousers and navy blue jacket, closed below his collar. His faded Nike running shoes suggest that this is a walk of habit, not one determined by a specific destination or purpose. He must be a religious weather checker. Clutching a black umbrella, he was clearly prepared for the rain. The umbrella is no defense against the water simply suspended in mid-air, though. He has surrendered the protection, umbrella swinging closed at his side. His glasses are lightly covered in raindrops, his familiar walk reduced to smears of color, hazy shapes and the muffled watery noise of the world outside the park.
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