we want to pass out in your yards

daydreams at night. i sat in the tub with a book in my hands a few minutes ago and closed my eyes, laid my head back to indulge a quick one. kelly and i, misbehaving. an extension of sorts from a theme of a week ago, a road trip. it would have to go west since we're in the east, she's in the north, and the south is too exhaustively explored. i'd have a job so money wouldn't be a problem. she would find time to take from school and i would take a week off from work. she could fly down and we'd take off on a friday night from winston towards nashville or some other spatter of light on the horizon. i didn't think hard enough to consider whether we would take highways or smaller roads. would the object be to make it as far west as possible or just to move, regardless of direction? we would drive when we wanted to, making ground and seeing whatever we felt for the first four days or so before turning around and heading back a different way.

there would be a tent and a sleeping bag or two in the trunk. we would find campsites when they were around, better to see the stars when outside the sprawling reach of light pollution. take photographs of the stars and of the flickering tongues of fire on each other's faces. when we were near a city, we'd scour the suburbs near sunset and find a suitable neighborhood, begging to pitch a tent in someone's back yard. walk to the door of one suspiciously paranoid american after another, trying to explain how we had nothing to sell, even our religion, that we only wanted whatever they wished to provide, be it food, water, a drink, a shower, or just the shelter of their property for the night. they would struggle to make excuses and we would wave it off, saying that it was fine. we were used to it. that we'd done this since north carolina and that we were usually turned away by five or ten cautious homeowners a night before finding someone willing to place enough trust in two dirty strangers with a volvo and big smiles.

before too long, we would stumble upon an old couple who would take us in. maybe offer us a room, nightcaps included. we'd sit around the living room fireplace with whiskeys and i'd play guitar and they would tell us about the summer of 1967 when the two of them took off and hitchhiked to san francisco just for the hell of it. with others we would gratefully be allowed to park outside the house and pitch a tent under a tree in the back yard. promising we wouldn't so much as look at the house and would be made scarce by 10am the following morning. so we would stumble about in the dark, singing songs to each other, planting stakes and folding plastic sheets in the shadow of the house from the harsh and unnatural light of the streetlamps. assembling poles and snapping clasps, erecting our little house for the next few hours. looking up, waving our arms around, squinting at the stars and scattered clouds and predicting the weather in our haphazard ways. cold enough for two sleeping bags or warm enough for one and a sheet? when we lay down we would close our eyes in accord with the dark or open the air vent and try to find constellations through the white mesh. talk in the dark, telling stories about our own youths, spent hundreds of miles apart. ideas of future plans, wondering how photographs will turn out and where we would be sixteen hours from now. and, when there's nothing else to say, describing to the best of our abilities the layouts of our bedrooms back home, moving each other's hands around in the tent space above our bags to illustrate what we couldn't find in words alone... marveling at the inevitable comparisons of those empty rooms to the tiny one we now fill nearly up.

and when all the new words putter dry, i would find a new rock or stick under my side of the tent that i hadn't noticed before and use this discovery as reason enough to shimmy over closer to the other side of the tent, greeted by giggles stifled to avoid waking the children of the neighborhood. same as every other night.

...

two weekends ago, on the fourth itself, i was riding with my family off the island, out north of beaufort, through the sticks and on a ferry boat, on towards oriental for the annual croaker festival. i was lonely, nose stuck to the backseat window i was bound to, scanning the inland coastal eastern landscape with not a person in sight. i lay in bed that night sorting through the memories, replacing my family and the car with kelly and cameras. there was a sign, wilting from under appreciation, advertising someone's knife, saw, and hatchet sharpening service, doubtlessly operating out of their own tool shed. i'd take it's photo with my imaginary nikon fe-1 with good black and white photo. it seemed suited for shallow depth of field with the meadow and treeline in the background. revealing nothing but the sign and the lonely space it occupied between here and nowhere.

a bit further down the road there sat what appeared to be an old store of some sort. there was a sagging sign above the door, dating from the fifties from the looks of it, advertising pepsi cola and also the country-sounding name of the store, strikingly cheerful even in death. the store itself was nothing more than dried and split wood siding and a roof that was rusted clear through in spots. i would stand in the woods to the right and frame the scene while kelly looked curiously up at the sign or drop the field to near nil and photograph the sign with her in the background, stepping cautiously and silently through the weeds, an anachronism in her own time.

...

then i woke up.

once i wanted to be...

it's buzzing tonight, the world, because of the alcohol i put in my drinks earlier. because of the email, automated and impersonal, kindly letting me know that novant health couldn't offer me employment at forsyth hospital. that i wasn't even invited for an interview. even after the strongly worded letter of recommendation. and the college contact who also held the position. she told me the doctors had received the letter and would call me when interviews start. i'm at the beach for two weeks and i'm the saddest i've been in a long time.

i sat in here earlier drinking with the television on and no phone for a while and couldn't see the black plastic latticework behind the keyboard for the white spots at the junctions.

i need to read and to talk myself silly but she's not here. my vacation is passing quickly. i track it based on our conversations. saturday night we texted until she didn't respond. she left a single message responding to an away that i left up just for her. we didn't talk for the rest of the day and i was lonely. monday i almost messaged her but decided not to. that night we talked for hours and i melted from resolved and honorable and atlas to her world to "letting it be"... wherein i try to be happy with whatever i get. unconcerned for dave or anyone else. nothing more, nothing less. she told me she was going to the camera obscura concert tuesday night with dave. said she felt like a traitor. she texted me once before she fell asleep and i responded with a "<3" and she knew what i meant. we didn't talk tuesday... but she texted me once from the concert. it was a picture of the band on stage and the text "when i told you i didn't love you, it was a lie." that's the last i heard from her. that's my vacation.

...

we set off yesterday morning for the usual intercoastal jaunt down towards swansboro. there were bombs in the sky. the dockmaster told us it was artillery fire over at the marine base up the waterway. you could feel it, like a demolition. i kept expecting it to hit me square in the chest like when the old press box fell but it never did. too far away. just the consistently varied background bursts that you felt in your soul more than heard. tiny explosions that you imagined more than knew. it should have been unsettling but it was horribly comfortable. i saw a wispy plume of black smoke to the east of us on the mainland. maybe i was born for a war zone...

i was lounging leaned back on the stern of the sea-doo as usual as we stole under the highway 58 and towards the town. i looked toward the sound of the bombs and saw lights in the sky. other boats passed but i stared at them. bright, hovering lights over the marine base. flares? planes? i don't know. they dropped slowly towards the earth or stayed still. once i lost one behind the treeline and there was another high up above. eventually they all disappeared and only the shock waves remained.

...

on the way back to the building on 58, we all looked to the north because the sky was dark and the clouds were burnt orange. the fire was acres wide.