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.