I’m not sure at what point in the past year I-5 started feeling like home. There is something much more comforting about the simplicity of I-5 before you encounter Portland than the highways bisecting St. Louis. The idea of “going for a drive” is not something that naturally comes to me. Any sort of outing was a major event growing up, and not driving as a teenager, I never spent hours wandering the roads on my own.
So it’s funny how Freak and I have fallen into this quiet, comfortable routine of heading for the car whenever one of us needs calming, or we need to talk, or we just need to do something. Part of me knows that we probably should be doing something more active with our evenings and weekends. But there is something about the quiet rhythm of I-5 that makes fights and disagreements melt away, that invites deep conversation, that welcomes grand dreams.
There’s also a certain bonding in exploring a new town or getting lost together. (Freak might not agree with me here . . .). I am a horrible navigator, and Freak is a little directionally impaired to boot. So we often end up wandering aimlessly, vaguely trying to get home, or get to some destination, trying to find an on ramp to the comfort zone of the interstate. There comes a point where one of us is frustrated, the other with low blood sugar, and road construction slows us to an unacceptable crawl. And it is in these minutes that I know we’re going to be okay.
Freak probably doesn’t get this—but I love being together in these situations—in the unknown, conquering obstacles, and finding unexpected chunks of time to expand our conversations. I like the feeling of security I get when traffic crawls by a nasty accident, or we drive through a not-so-great neighborhood, and I feel his hand on my knee. And I know love. Given the purpose of getting un-lost, of getting through the snarl together, I feel needed (not to say that I don’t occasionally feel harried when I’m asked to make a snap judgment in foreign territory).
Sometimes when we clash over money, or miscommunications, or unrealistic requirements, the immediacy of working problems out crowds out the bigger picture. Each resolution creates a bigger canvas for us to work with. It’s like framing out an addition for a house. We do all the hard work on adding rooms on, that sometimes we can’t see how beautifully it all works together. In the car, we paint on the canvas, furnish the rooms, and the day to day stuff seems worth it.
Yesterday we went just to go. Just because we hadn’t in a while. It wasn’t so much where we ended up as going somewhere. We ended up at Eugene’s Saturday market. We went a year ago or so when we were visiting the area. I was reminded of who we were then, and who we are now, and I like who we are now, complications and all. I felt much more together throughout the rest of the day. Just because we went.
Comments