Flight of the Navigator

I am driving down the road and there's this red car in front of me. My mind is a million other places. I'm thinking about the conversation I've just had. I'm hungry and looking for a place to eat. I'm waiting for my phone to ring and your picture to appear on the screen. I’m trying to find out just how much the streetlights blur when I speed.
I’m lonely and have no idea where I’m going.
I just don’t want to be sitting still anymore
..unless I’m somehow moving forward at the same time.
The other car drives tentatively, making me think he wants to get over into my lane. Almost as if the car were the indecisive one instead of the driver -- weaving slightly inside the lines, hoping to catch a scent in the air that will tell it where to go.

I slow down and motion for him to merge over -- but he does nothing. It’s not like there are a lot of other cars on the road, it’s not like he’s in my way or I’m slowing him down. We’re leaves floating on the surface of the water, and I’m in no particular hurry.. Why not let him slide over?

I think for a second about bumping the horn, but I decide against it and simply flash my headlights instead.
No response.
This goes on for a while and eventually gets annoying. And yet in the very same instant that I’m deciding it's not worth the trouble I find some small part of myself feeling wounded.

I mean, It’s a lonely world out there. People cut you down sometimes just because they can. I know it’s a just little thing, but I’m trying to reach out here. It’s not something I have to do. For all I know you could be a serial killer, some nut job with an axe to grind. But right here at this moment it doesn’t really matter -- because it looks like you want to get over and I’m trying to help.

Eventually I give up, drive at a normal speed and move past. At the next stoplight he pulls up next to me, and for no other reason than the fact that we'd had that interaction I can’t help but glance across to try and see what kind of person it was that had refused me,
Only to see the driver leaning his head back while the girl in the
other seat (who I hadn't seen before) continued going down on him.
If I hadn't felt lonely before, this certainly hammered the point home. I don't know -- sometimes when you catch sight of that sort of thing you think to yourself "good for you, high five" but other times when you're all bummed out that you've got no one of your own -- all you can do is wish you were there instead.

Going out to dinner by myself after seeing something like that was probably a mistake. Dinner for one is never really that great of an idea, especially when you’re having the kind of meal that you’d much rather share with someone else – but I hadn’t eaten anything all day, and somehow I knew a bean burrito just wasn’t gonna cut it.

So my night was kind of a downer. I had a wonderful phone conversation with j, but her laughter on the line couldn’t help but be a reminder of just how far away she really was – which didn’t do me any good in erasing the way I was feeling.

I finished my food, paid the bill, and went back home to sleep.
I ended up having a dream where I was
driving the red car -- so it wasn’t a total loss
But it was a really lonely night
..And those get old sometimes.
[Listening to: (hed) PE, "Dangerous"]

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