THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 9 - The Ride Home

03/15/04

I don't recall actually leaving the rest stop, but after spending so much of my time there in a delirious daydream, that's not really a surprise. I found myself in my car blasting a new CD, windows down, and gliding down a stretch of Americana.

I didn't realize until I stopped for gas off the parkway. I was headed south, I was headed towards home.

My dreams have been plenty lately and the intensity of them has been draining to say the least. It's almost like my body would much prefer the simplicity of dormant identity. I find myself talking to old friends and revisiting boyhood haunts. But I'm seeing them as they are now, not as I recall them. They're changed, hacked up, and shown as something completely new. Something clean.

A beautiful blue sky lies open above me, welcoming me to this world of possible unity. It's hard to say but hope is stronger in me than ever. Something happened to me back there at that rest stop. I feel stripped of my pain and confusion.

I look at the cracked concrete between my feet as if seeing such a sight for the first time. I see it as if it were the most important thing in the world. It might be, but then this cold metal gas pump in my hand is no less important, nor the many ordinary things that dance the daily routine around me.

With the change from the last of my money I get a bottle of water and a bagel. Once out on the road again I've found that the bagel is the best I have ever had. My final meal before facing whatever is coming before me now. I wash it down with the water and I swear I can feel my body breaking it down and converting it, sucking from it the nutrients it provides.

I take a break from singing at the top of my lungs to laugh heartily as I cross over the bridge and approach the tollbooth. I've always been afraid of bridges. Well, I used to be anyway. I hadn't thought about it in so long but now I can see this bridge just as I did when I traveled over it twenty years ago in the back seat of the family car.

Frantically worrying about paying the upcoming toll, my mind releases itself. I'm suddenly a kid again, sick from the smell of exhaust and the bouncing of the road, my mind slipping into a daydream not unlike the experience at the rest stop. A blurring of the edges, riding through the physical pain, and winding up somewhere in a place where all the rules you've made up for yourself no longer apply.