Mine

“This isn’t our song,” he told me upon hearing the song I had chosen to start our road trip.  “I don’t want you thinking we have a song.”

“I know,” I replied.  And he turned up the volume on the song that wasn’t ours.  And we drove over the Triborough Bridge and I sipped from his coffee cup.

That day was the first in over a year that I had felt entirely, completely, unyieldingly happy.  The day was like him, comforting and exciting and – I was convinced – something I had needed for a long time. 

I liked the way he sang hallelujah high notes when we were stuck in traffic on the highway.  I hadn’t enjoyed anything so much since I my younger brother and I drove from Wisconsin to Chicago, singing our own highway hallelujahs while sipping Mexican cokes.  I liked the way he shouted at me to take the wheel while he lit a cigarette.  I liked eating McDonald’s in the car as we drove on and he asked to know me better and I told him the worst.  And I was overwhelmed by the way he told me I could be so much better.  And I loved the way the green grass countryside seemed limitless on either side of us as we left the highway and made our way down winding country roads.  I loved being boundless for the first time since moving to New York.

And when we arrived at our destination, at a small motel surrounded by fields of knee-high green grasses, I left him by the car while I went running through the fields, free and happy and home in a place I had never been before.  

The place wasn’t mine.  He wasn’t mine.  And the song wasn’t ours.  But together they were everything to me.

That night, in our motel room, I had asked him to let me sleep in his bed with him.  I said I couldn’t sleep alone with the lights off; I’m still afraid of the dark.  But he flipped the light switch and got into his bed, separated from mine by a nightstand upon which sat the standard hotel room Bible, his lighter and my notebook.  And eventually I fell asleep to the sound of his breathing.  In the dark, the sound felt warm.

I woke early the next morning to watch the sunrise.  I pulled my jean jacket over my pajamas that he had made fun of for being too frilly and I slipped out of the room, quietly -- but not too quietly.  A part of me wanted him to wake up and join me in watching the sun burn red and then flicker pink above hills and the highway and the grass that was still wet with dew beneath my toes, but I also liked the feeling of being alone in that almost foreign land of 5a.m. in the countryside.  He didn’t wake and as the sun crept up past six and seven and eight o’clock, I returned to my bed and watched him sleep in his.

Months later, I found a bottle tab from one of the bottles of agave margaritas that he and I had bought at the liquor store down the road from our motel that night.  We had drank the bottled margaritas on the cement porch outside our motel room, while he smoked a joint – and then another – and I wrote in my notebook.

On our drive back to New York, he bought us a basket of strawberries from a roadside stand.  We ate the berries in the car, they tasted sweet but also like the dirt that they had come from.  And we listened again to the song that wasn’t ours.