The dirt road stained the car.
I normally drove but this time
she sat with her left foot curled beneath her.
Her free and bare foot barely touching the pedal.
Left arm dangling out the window,
while her right clung loosely to the wheel.
And she talked.
"That was the house my parents built.
My mom was supposed to get it but he kept it.
That is the church my dad was
going to marry her in.
But she's crazy, she'll never marry him.
This is the lake where I was going to build my
house when I grew up and married him.
But I didn't do that,
and it looks like someone bought it anyway."
And she laughed.
"This is where we always planned on skinny dipping.
But we were too scared until we were too old.
This is where my brother was supposed to marry my best friend.
But they are both on drugs now.
This is where he and I would swim and talk,
and he told me he would marry me.
I hear he is getting deployed to Texas
and that he got a tattoo across his shoulders."
Sometimes she would just drive,
Her eyes on something in the distance.
Because some of them weren't for me.
The place where she nearly drown.
The place her brother gave up on her.
When maybe she should have given up on him.
The last place she saw the first friend she ever had.
"Sometimes I think I should have stayed."
But she knows better.
And the gravel wound cornfields for miles.
And she talked,
and she laughed.