I ride in a car for the first time in a while. We usually commute by bus and bicycle now, but I spent my entire childhood in the backseat of a minivan and most of my young adulthood behind the wheel of whatever four-door sedan I could get my hands on. All this means that riding in a car feels nostalgic. I press my forehead into the glass and look out the window.
Along the side of the road, I spot a collection of cone-shaped white flowers. Some part of my brain tells me that they are morning glories, and I remember that morning glories grow in the desert. I am from the desert, but now I live in the land of Brothers Grimm fairytales, so the flowers feel out of place alongside the Autobahn.
Song lyrics pop in to my head: “But something about it felt like home somehow.” The melody runs through my brain, this one line from a ten-minute-long song on repeat. The music in my mind triggers grief and nostalgia. Morning glories make me long for a home that no longer exists and a mother who isn’t who I thought she was. I can’t picture the exact memory, but I am enveloped in a feeling, rich as the flower petals themselves, strong as my mother’s arms, fragrant as the desert after rain. I imagine myself wrapped in the white cones as they furl closed for the evening. It’s easy to float off into your mind in the passenger seat of a car.
Another line from the same artist pops into my head: “And the road not taken looks real good now.” I revise screenplays for a living, and I tell my brain that the song choice is a little on the nose, beings that my husband and I are driving down the road in the middle of this life. It’s a life I coveted for so long that I don’t know what to do with it anymore. When dreams come true, you don’t know what to long for anymore, so you start yearning for things that don’t exist. Things like home.
On paper, I am a working woman and a writer and a wife, but really, I am just a little girl who wants to go home. Leave it to the flowers to tell you such a thing, the artists who seem to understand. Maybe home can be something as small as a patch of white flowers, and maybe the roads not traveled will always haunt me like white ghosts. Lord knows there are so many. My heart is a map of decisions made and not made and people loved, lost, and held close. The roads crisscross all around, like Parisian alleyways instead of the neat grids of Arizona and Los Angeles.
Like my thoughts, they are impossible to follow. The only road is the road ahead, and we’re moving so fast that I can’t see the flowers anymore.
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