dust roads

The sun gleams off of the dashboard in a display that makes me wrinkle my nose. Yet my skin drinks in the heat, swallows greedily the glow that comes through the sun roof in the old four wheeled machine. I let my eyelashes dust off my cheeks for a moment and when I reopen them I glimpse at my hands, wondering whether they will be the ones to tell me how different today is.

It is my birthday and in the backseat of the car is a single red balloon. It floats in the rearview mirror and I see a splash of it every time I look up and back. It is partially deflated in that it has been in this car for too long with the same air on its inside and on its outside.

When I look to either side of me, I see dust and highway, dust and highway. Everything is brown, like my butterscotch cupcake. I already ate my cupcake, yet it looks like every rock is a crumb. I wish for once on my birthday I wouldn’t be the one who can’t eat all the cake they put in front of me.

I glance over at the figure with his aviator sunglasses and his tanned hands on the steering wheel. He is a familiar face, familiar to me when I look directly at him and familiar to me when I look in the mirror. But the familiarity ends where the looks stop. The sounds, the smell, the texture of the seat where I am sitting, all are that unfamiliar question of a place you don’t visit often enough.

But it is all right. Everything is all right, as long as I am not here alone. My tiny sneakers don’t touch the floor but that’s okay. I am small enough to understand that size only matters when age takes me. I turn my head. It’s enough for one look, I decide, and I close my eyes, just for a minute.

It’s a shame I had to leave my birthday party. I could have had more than a single red balloon to show for my birthday.  But it’s okay, because I don’t mind that there are two sides to every story of me. This dusty road is the second half of my birthday chapter.

What a wonderful day anyway, because it has that feeling of selfishness, and nobody can take it from me. When else could I wake up, after all, with only myself in mind?

We finally slow down as we get to where we are going. I stumble out of the car with a dizziness that comes from stillness in the wake of motion. This walk will become routine for me, it will relate the drive and the destination with the leaving and the preparation.

It becomes a dream.

Perhaps it was a dream after all.