I fell asleep in the car on the interstate. There was a big stormy sky all around, and the trucks threw great plumes of water across the windshield but I slept anyway. I had piled the coats on top of me and turned up the heat, not quite all the way, and the rain and the hum of the tires made for a white noise road trip lullaby. I had a cold, the kind that sends you into a four or five day lethargy and sends your mate off to the pharmacy for remedies that may or may not work, but make you feel better for having them on the bedside table. The temperatures in the Pacific Northwest dropped enough for there to be a dusting of snow on the Willamette Valley, and further north, near Olympia, and further north still, on our front lawn. I slept for sixty miles on the way south and sixty miles on the way north and when I awoke, in either direction, the sky was gray and the mountains were gray and the horizon was gray too.
The highway was like driving through sleep, like taking all your weird not exactly nightmares and then, turning on the headlights and punching through a wet map. I dreamed of broken headphones and my father’s memory and the show I would miss because I was to worn to stand for more than an hour, not to mention play. I dreamed about art school and books I was supposed to read and then, awake, I took pictures out the window because the blur of water on glass didn’t obscure the landscape so much as it made things look exactly like 120 miles of foggy gray interstate sleep.
