I feel so helpless in the backseat Speed-complacent car crash risk Apparently, obviously, worth taking.
Orange warm highway street lamps Somniferous strobelights melodic-hypnotic through the blackred veil of my Stubborn eyelids.
Highway streelights Like when I was twelve and Every Tuesday/Thursday Mom picked me up from school And drove me straight to ACTS Acting Academy In Northwest OKC.
How simple it was back then, The only problem or So it seemed was the 49 minute drive to and Especially from.
...
Yet strangely so peaceful.
I had actual friends in acting class, I waited all week to see them.
I practiced my monologue fifteen minutes everyday Just to prove to dad That I cared enough to justify the time and the money (mostly the money) That mom had to spend To drive meΒ Β tothe city twice a week To see my friends To see my friends from acting class.
How was I supposed to know That those highway drives homes 9:15pm Would be the most peaceful memory I would ever remember to forget? The last refuge of contentment I would ever to feel?
How was I supposed to know How much worse it'd get?
Yet even then, age twelve, Even then all we thought of it was a burden. Driving there and back There and back There and back
...
And of course mom felt that way, too. Tired from long days of home health. Most of that job was just driving somewhere And somewhere else. Yet eventually Tacitly Under the subtle strobeof orange warn highway street lights She found herself more at home in that car Than anywhere else in her limited bounds.
Slowly she found herself speaking candidly for once To finally someone who would listen Even if sadly it had to be Her twelve year old son Driving to the city.
Equal parts proud and deeply disturbed At the realization that I was her best friend She became mine, too.
Sometimes she spent that whole drive there Having the same time ten minute conversation Five times over To Meema in the nursing home (How sad vascular dementia must be)
And then there was driving home.
I was tired. I fell asleep with my iPod headphones Blaring awful screamo melodrama.
Driving home she had only her thoughts. How strange I now imagine she must have felt. Orange warm streetlamp hypnosis Freedom.
How many decades had she gone without those thoughts? How many years had she gone to the grocery store after work? How long had that credit card debt been compounding? How long had she been asleep? -- Ambien sleep--years without a dream?
How many loops to that class That pre-teen California pilot season prep class Did she have to make Until she Finally Had a thought of her own?
I feel so helpless in the backseat. All those lessons I learned And forgot And remembered And tried so hard to forget again In that Oklahoma City acting class At twelve years old Before it all got worse Before it eventually got comparatively better again
Helpless even more now that I realize That I've spent the last decade plus Trying so hard to forget How peacefully pretragic Those Tuesday, Thursday twelve year old nights Actually were.
Orange warm highway street lights tracing by Driving home tired.
I was twelve learning how to be kind of happy
She was 45 Also learning How to be kind of happy
As the highway street lights traced by And we were both so desperate to be home Yet also happy not To be home yet.
( sadder than I've ever felt. Why has it come back?
I've been happy for years I don't want to write poetry again I don't want to feel this way Again) ****.