One Day it is All Going to End

Fifty-three miles into Tennessee, the drone of the car engine is beginning to lull him to sleep. Mountains line the horizon, and he hasn't crested the biggest of them yet. He's passed the billboards announcing his arrival into hick country—buy ammo here; Jesus is LORD—but he doesn't know where he is yet. He's halfway between nowhere and somewhere else, approaching exit 74, looking out for the bridge lined with lamp-posts, and the Sonic, and the Walgreens. 

He will unfold from the driver's seat to stretch and gaze at the north Tennessee sky, because he didn’t crash his car into the embankment outside his neighborhood when he was seventeen. Maybe it’s a miracle he didn’t. He wrote lines that year, about how only God can decide it’s our time to die, when he knew himself to be the only being who could make it stop. Every day, numb hands on the steering wheel, he chose asphalt over oblivion. 

Two-hundred and thirty-six miles south of Portland, Tennessee, he could climb that embankment and lay down a bouquet of tall grass for the teenager whose dream was never realized. He could leave a memorial to the desire that ended as silently as it lived, without anyone taking notice of its disappearance.

One day it is all going to end. It will end quietly, marked by signs without substance. An inflatable rubber duck tethered at the side of the highway. Drive-through fries in the passenger seat. A left turn onto TN 109 north.