October 31, 2003

I drove home from Connecticut, facing into a wall of orange sky the whole way, a towering, California ash-fed spectacle pierced by the highway ribbon in front of me and bordered by the trees to either side. Hypnotic and time-rending, it carried me back ten years or so, and I felt my head nod to one side as the Cocteau Twins on the tape deck orchestrated the mood.

Which is not so good when you're barrelling down the Thruway at 80+ miles per hour. Every time the ephemeral toot-toot flutes of drifty time-neutral sensation would buoy me, I'd come to and realize that I'd gone up a slight grade and slowed down by 15 mph or so, and that people in the fast lane were riding my ass, and that if someone ahead of me had thrown a tire or something I'd be chewing an airbag.

This was hammered home when I passed by a left-lane three-car pileup involving a minivan that had become one with the guardrail and two other well-smahsed cars that had spun around and were facing me from the shoulder amid glittering bits of themselves. Everyone was out and walking around and cell-phoning, but it was enough to make me snap-to, for awhile.

Then the towering colored atmospherics would kick in again, offering acute sensations of looking across the surface of a planet through a thick layer of its atmosphere and then out into space where the sun's photons shower. I felt youthful, and even though I was hurtling along in my Honda o'doom I puffed the feeling up, trying to loft it like a lung-filled balloon, to keep it from vanishing and bringing me back down to earth.

Because that feeling, whatever it was, the sheer sensation of hey, look at that! reminded me of a drastic void in my life, something that I lost along the way, something that I put down in the haste of the past five years or so, and left behind in a small box in a closet somewhere. I wanted more of it, I needed more of it, and so I traded several minutes' worth of 80-mile per hour safety to experience it, to hold it gently, to get into it, so that I would know what it felt like, and could find those things in my life that would create more of it.

I kept it up until the sun sank behind a black hill speeding by, leaving a patch of pumpkin-colored sky behind it.

Must search that feeling out.

Must find the things in my life that bring it forth.

Must...

must...

must.