Musings from the road

I feel a little, well, silly taking the time to update this when only two people seem to be reading it at all. But it's alright, I'm doing it anyway. If it pleases you, read on, and if it bores you, by all means, accept the alluring beckoning of that big, red X button.

It's the third day of our trip south. Well, that's a little odd to say, because I haven't been counting the days. This is the third strange city we stop in, the third hotel room whose floor (maybe even a bed, if I can beat the others to one) I'll be sleeping on. The third long, restful night of sleep I will endulge in. These are the things I notice. The days have bled together, from avenues to highways to interstates to gravel roads. Kilometers to miles. Clipped, clean accents to american drawl. It's a slow transition, but it's there. And it's all comforting to me. I've slept better in the past three days than I could ever sleep in a week - hell, a month - back home.

Odds and ends I wrote each day but never found the time to post:

Thursday, June 28th: We left today as soon as my mom got off work. It's a short day, and the highways are smooth and straight. We crossed the border easily enough. We passed a tree about an hour into North Dakota and I've been aching ever since, because I should have taken a picture of it. It symbolized the state, the entire day, perfectly. It was a big tree with long, lean branches, lone in the middle of a huge expanse of a feild. It had long strings of green trailing from its branches. It might have been a weeping willow, but it was too think, I think. Anyway, the tree itself was half crippled. Some of its branches jutted out at awkward angels. Some hung down, dead. It's hard to explain in words, but I saw it and it just struck me as something I should take a picture of. But I didn't. We stopped in Minot, an endearing little city, but nothing overly special, and stayed at a Comfort Inn for the night. It was...okay.

Friday, June 29th: I spend about 90% of the time we spent on the road dead to the world. The dead feeling North Dakota emits is hard to shake off. I buried my nose in books, singing absentmindedly to whatever happened to be on the radio. I devoured each story of Jesus' Son in quick succession, and following a short period of scattered thoughts in which I wondered if it was possible to O.D. on a book, I picked up Endgame. I was a virgin to the book, but it grew on me quickly, until the very end, where reading became arduous as I knew what would happen. And it did. I still haven't shaken off the weight of those two books. We scrambled around Miles City until we found the Best Western. Miles City is like a walk through the 50's. It's horrible, and it happened to be 40 degrees Celcius. Urgh.

Saturday, June 30th: A relatively short driving day. We left early in the morning and arrived in Bozeman at about 4:00. We decided to visit the mall, for lack of a better way to kill time, and I bought a CD, another book to fight off the boredom when the scenery gets flat again, a shirt and some makeup. Nothing too special. Flicked through the channels. Read some of my book (It's Kind of a Long Story. It's a teen book, but so far it's charming nonetheless). Listened to the new CD (Dying is Your Latest Fashion, by Escape the Fate. My heaviest band, heh.) while typing this up.

It's a comfy city that I like to imagine myself living in, foolishly. Everything I imagine myself doing is a fool's dream. The hotel room isn't overly large, but just like the city, it's comfortable.

I'm honestly boring myself. But I just can't help but babble about my travelling. There's a feeling it gives me that I obviously can't express and have wasted the past 45 minutes trying to get it out. I feel light and free. We have a destination in mind, but nothing else as of yet. We may take the same route home, or an entirely different one, or my older sister and I may be flying back and spending some time with family or friends while we wait for the others to drive back. It's all up in the air.

I can't stop thinking about love. Romance. Crushes. Lust. It's always on my mind, at least partly, turning over and over but never really doing anything more, like an engine that won't start. I have a certain name on my lips, a daydream in my eyelids, and a memory in my brain that seems to cancel out the other two. I've been through a lot and I don't trust anyone with this love business. Myself included.

Well, it's late and everyone else is out. I should sleep, too. Goodnight.