'We Never Know Nothin' - Nikki Rains

The crisp, chilled [not on the rocks] midnight air surrounded me in a sort of luminous surrealism. I felt clouded and congested with a sort of underwhelming sense of unimportance. Sometimes it feels good to blend in with the wall. Rather than just spend my night laying on my back in the car, I lied in the back of the car. I did not know that he would take it so personal. I did not know that he meant it for serious. I wouldn't have opened the passenger door if I would have known it meant forever. I think we were both terrified, looking at each other, getting more uneasy by the minute. The warm impermanence was replaced by a shot of edge and uneasiness. We were homeless! Nothing was supposed to last. I didn't know that I was the glue in your sticky situation.

Goodbye, golden years.

I knew that being 18, hitchhiking across the world, dropping everything and running, this all had to end some day. But I didn't mean today.

We came back home, we lived near his mother. We went to dinners Sunday night, and visited the grandparents-in-law for Christmas. My skin has turned deep shades of blue, this lease is a leash.

Although my body is constantly going through a metamorphosis of throwing itself up, there is some light in this tunnel. Nobody would stay in the path of a tornado if there wasn't something there they couldn't give up.

And when I was lying/lie-ing in the back of that car, wrapped up in his arms, I agreed to disagree. Des Moines is uninhabitable. He is my spacesuit. I don't feel at home unless I'm in the back of someone's car with a bottle and a cardboard sign. The air isn't breathable unless it's got a musk of incense and condensed Sparks. Until I fall asleep to the cold dew seeping in the car windows early on a Montana morning and hours later awake to the sun rising on the Washington-Pacific border, I always feel like my thumbs are down, when I know they should be up, flagging another ride.

Although I am not one to talk about food (for fear my veins will become coagulated with Iowa’s indigenous butter cow at the mere mention of), I say that nothing tastes better than bathtub ramen when you've spent the past three days facedown on the sidewalk trying to round up spare change. Dry ramen for breakfast, hot ramen for dinner. You get a stomach of steel and your alcohol tolerance goes down. Weeklong stays in trashy motels, neighbors who come over and try to get to know you with smokable amphetamines. I wouldn't have traded the rough, gritty feeling of a dirty motel blanket for all the corn in Iowa. It's not the coast that I love, it's the movement. The world vanishes in lines beneath your feet, all hours of the day.

Velocity is a vector quality, and freedom is a compulsory quality.