All in Time Due ((Part 2))

Before I get started here, in force, let me draw attention to the fact that a close friend of mine said something along the lines of “This series is good. You should write more like this one.” As such, let me write more like this one. In other words, let me continue to try and break away from my antagonists, their miserable minds, and the damages their tiny pieces drive them to compensate through. Alright. Here’s to moving on.

[TRAIN CONTINUES TO RUN ME OVER]

[AMONG LIMBS ASKEW, A RAISED BEER EMERGES]

[A STOP SIGN FALLS]

In the beginning of this series, I wrote about my academic life, about how I spent so much time as a graduate student, and what I enjoyed about it all. Let me now take a little more of a focused approach. Let me write about that one time Kelly and I ran away, across the United States, while still very much kids. Both of us lived in the same trailer park, had many of the same friends, and made out, like all the time. She was my first major love.

Nadia was cool, but I wouldn’t call that love.

So, Kelly and I, fed up with everything TRAILER PARK, made a plan to leave it all behind. What a HUGE undertaking. We had talked about running away many times, mostly not seriously. Then, one night when something that I cannot recall happened, something getting in the way of our love, we did it.

The first step was waiting for her parents to go to sleep, so that she could sneak out once and for all. During this time, I headed to Chris Day’s place to give him my Playstation 1, games. Of course, and as expected, he responded with something along the lines of how I’d be back some day, how the whole thing wouldn’t work. Little did he know, I was actually about to do it, to run away, for love. I had ran away many times before, but this time felt different. Adulthood was coming in less than a year. I was 17.

She was 16.

We were kids on the move, toward voting and alcohol and all that jazz, life. Maybe even jazz itself. I was fond mostly of FUEL at that time, but jazz is here now.

In the dark, tired of being tired about love, we left. At the time, the bikes of others were fair game because the world was so unfair to us to begin with. Those with nothing HAVE to steal. Maybe not bikes, but you get what I mean. Here, we gathered some bikes and hit the road. We headed north. Because: south would’ve meant The Everglades, and we didn’t want any of that. We wanted better weather, different people, and the potential of staying with my grandparents in Texas.

Still, we didn’t let ANYONE know. Outside of Chris. And Chris wouldn’t tell anyone. He was that kind of friend. Was. So, tired, abused, and poor, we went north. The bikes didn’t last very long. Especially considering that we rode them, not along a bike trail, as would have made sense. We, instead, took them along US 19. Anyone from this part of Florida knows the 19 like the back of their hand. It’s the cheaper way to Tallahassee from Tampa. It’s also the one with more traffic. And traffic sucks, timelessly.

And speaking of time. We didn’t care about it. It was like love had taken that element of life over, maybe for good. We were held, for some time, in a mode of living guided in units of the heart. Time meant nothing.

So, as the bikes broke down, we made our way. It didn’t matter. The bikes didn’t matter. Getting away from everything did. Now, away from the bikes too. Because, it’s everything we leave behind that makes the past. Because, when we get back to the things we know from before, they are never really any much the same. It’s like when you get back to the lake, to have the same trip as before, only to find that you left the camp chair somewhere else.

[INSERT A COUPLE WALKING]

[INSERT SWEATY HANDS HELD CLOSE AND TIGHT]

Of course, we didn’t have any bed with us, nor the money for any hotel rooms. Motel rooms either. Actually, we had no money. Some may call this foolish. But I consider it probably the most beautiful part of this whole thing, the story itself. More beautiful than the hot Florida sun beaming down upon us. I haven’t mentioned this yet, because my mind, nonlinear, misses the details; but it was Summer then. Like the beginning of Summer, when the road itself wishes to be outside of those harsh miseries it actually lives. You know, one of those times of year when the heat can be seen drifting through the road, into the air some higher than a tall-standing man.

And we weren’t really standing. We were sluggish and hot, maybe even depressed. Still, those beads of sweat drip-dropping off of Kelly’s somewhat Native American face were enough to keep me going. She was beautiful, man. I loved her. And then I didn’t. But for now, as this story leads, I did. I could, at that time, see no end to loving her. It’s how my life was going to go.

Now, you can figure, based on the drive I am describing, that we slept where we could. Most memorably, on a cardboard box, behind a supermarket. The very same I was forced, through immense thirst, to “G” a Sunny Delight from.

[THIS STORY IS not BROUGHT TO YOU buy SUNNY DELIGHT]

We took turns sleeping, drank the stolen “juice” and livened up enough to keep going. We were shot. Beat. Like piles of hot shit, sitting on a mountain of other, hot shit. So, we tested the notion that putting our thumb(s) out could lead to an easier time. We were hitchhiking. And it was cool.

At first, no one was picking us up. I was 17 in the early 2000’s, which places this story somewhere around 9/11, between perhaps THIS war and THAT war. Before the war tools were pointed directly at the citizens who helped to fund them. I mean, if the television is going on about terrorists, destruction, and all sorts of other heinous goings on, then why would anyone pick us up? I had blue hair, and her lot was obviously poor. I’m not saying she was ugly. She wasn’t. But, she had that undefinable characteristic of having lived too much too quickly that comes from the stress of living in a trailer park.

If you’ve ever been there, then you know what I mean.

Otherwise, maybe give being poor a try. It’s tough. A lot tougher than having money. Even with the stress of having to worry about boat payments and exorbitant holidays in foreign places. We didn’t know those things.

What we did know was that the drivers giving us rides were scared, hesitant. When we finally got picked up, I was asked to keep my hands where the guy could see them. This man was worried, in spite of my lack of knife and knife-money, that I was to stab his head. This would have been dumb. I was in the back of the car. And this would have meant us all leaving the road. And that’s not how a love story works.

Not even this one.

[DISTRACTION ENABLED]

It has just dawned on me that the man sitting next to me a moment ago may not have been instructed to distract me away from writing, this part of the series. He could have just had a cold, could have been making other repeated noises randomly. So, when I banged on the table in response (i.e., disrupt the disrupters every chance you get, ALWAYS) I may have been a dick. This happens. And if you’re not a fucking plant, dude, then I’m sorry.

By the way, this man eventually left. I’m not sure if due to me, or some other thing he has going on. But he has left, and I was very much being counter-aggressive. I took even to standing up at some point and looking directly at him. I should consider calming down.

[INSERT IMAGE OF A KITTEN]

[A SMALL DOG HAVING GOOD FOOD]

[A SMALLER DOG EATING EVIL]

Man, we were able to make so much ground by the force of our thumbs. Something, something ROME. Something, something ROADS. From car to car, we cleared the miles. Each driver worried as much as they normally do about things. And this is OK. We worried too. We could easily have been eaten. But, we kept those things out of mind. Our focus was on making it to grandma’s to set up a new life in what amounts to a new place. new to us, anyways.

When our stretch of thumb-waiving finally came to an end, we were somewhere along I-10 in Tallahassee. Oh how far we had come. If you wish for me to be exact, of course: this is more than 250 miles. I just checked. It had never occurred to me to check until now. Because that’s how the disease of time works. We let it go, only to find that, one day, we shouldn’t have let it go. Either way, we let it go.

Now, neither of us knew ANYTHING at all about Tallahassee. I hadn’t yet traveled there during college to party with Phil and his friends. These events are before knowing. So, we did our best to make sense of the whole thing. Love was the fuel. All else didn’t matter. Not the cars zipping past, nor the people looking at us like “why are you ANYWHERE near THIS highway, man?”

And Kelly.

What came next? I had to think about it. Oh yeah, that SILK TREE driver. A man in a semi with hog in tow, intentions for Sturgis. South Dakota. If we played our cards just right, we too could be headed for Sturgis. Our cards must’ve been a bit fine. They got us into the truck, and on the terms. I was to help with the trees, and we were to move along. The road was now under our feet yet again. We had a pass. And that pass was work.

As is ALWAYS the case.

WORK IS ALWAYS THE CASE

There’s a new state!!! It’s called Georgia. That one is Tennessee. Oh, look. There’s Alabama. To cook our minds with new experience. We had never seen any of this. Because that’s how being poor works. Your sphere of experience is small, and usually remains that way, as such. Here we were, travelling, as travelers. Outside of being both children and runaways, this was all so allowed. Still, as I sit here and type this up, I realize that the driver must have been in his 40’s, like I am now. I couldn’t imagine picking up kids like this. The world seems so dangerous now, even when it comes to the implication.

I try to hold these posts to some four or so pages. Well, that’s shot.

When the heart is involved.

We spent a total of three months gone, and this story is about a week or so in. So, there was so much more to see. Perhaps this should be a two-part kind of thing? Either way, and once we had spent another week or so headed along the east coast, not the coast itself but places along that region, we headed West. When to capitalize directions? When I feel like it. So it goes.

Thanks, Vonnegut. You rock, man. Even while looking like a smoky Muppet.

As such, we headed again along I-10. He had made his deliveries out east. Now, the task was to help our way through the dryer states. I hadn’t yet moved to Boulder County, had not yet met my father twice, and didn’t yet understand how the WEST actually works.

Capitalize whole thing, can’t be wrong.

Neither Kelly nor I had any idea of how this all could work. We didn’t know the roads. But, we knew love. We knew that a good heart usually leads one to a pure place, even if evil is waiting in all places. We knew all this. I can recall a conversation her and I were having as the trucker went in to take a shower at some road-side shower-place. I went on about what we would do for work once we finally made it to Texas. I had dropped out in the 9th grade and so was probably quite dumb, and not yet equipped for the kinds of statistical analyses I would go on to conduct. Dumb? No.

UNLEARNED.

AND FULL OF FUEL

‘S MUSIC.

Yes, Fuel. Kelly knew I loved that band. That many of my ideas came from their lyrics. Well, this conversation concerned just that. I mentioned how I could learn how to sing and form a band, like Fuel. Little did I know, I would someday struggle hard as fuck at just that. I would become Rythur, trying to do the whole thing myself. And this is AFTER I got back and formed an actual band that sound(s)(ed) nothing like Fuel. It was a hardcore band, by the name of Deathbed December. Still, I hadn’t started playing ANY musical instrument. The best I had done was singing along to N’Sync, rather poorly.

This all makes my ideas sound nuts. And even to this day, they are. So, the idea was for me to form a band for us to make a living. Yeah, right. What a trooper Kelly was for entertaining me like this. I feel love in my gut for her now as I type this, some two decades later and more. I love women like this. I love it when I love someone who lets me be me. When I am free to make the best of life in the ways that my gut tells me to go. Now that’s freedom.

And in speaking this paragraph past, I notice starkly that I have not mentioned Kelly’s path very much. Why? Am I some sexist monster? No. Kelly and I were one. And in being so, my story was her’s too. I know that it doesn’t really work that way, perception, but yeah, she was doing what I was doing. For the most. Part of this all is that we grew so much. Both of us. We learned more than the past of our lives had instructed us. We were becoming street-smart, in spite of the good grades. Did Kelly get good grades? I can’t remember.

What I do remember is that she was good at loving me. At taking my virginity. And the virginity of all relationships since. She was good for me.

We got back from all of this and broke ties. Surmised that it didn’t, and therefore couldn’t, work out. Now THAT would be a short ending, if it weren’t the truth. Before then, and however, we would make it through Texas by trees. The Trucker was friendly and accommodating enough. His trees were being delivered and all he had to do was put up with the stench of two teenagers running away. And from Florida.

So, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and everything in between. Then, after a conversation about how cool it would be for us to come with him to Sturgis, we went to Sturgis. Via love, each other, trees, and bikes. We got to see how Colorado works. Mostly outside of the people. It shines brightly and dry, as the locals complain about everything and do nothing but complain further still. This one sucks and so does that. You eat too much of this. I’m good for this other reason. Yeah, OK.

But, before I learned about the people, we leaned about the beauty. I can recall looking out at the world below, for the first time, foreign even to mountains then, and thinking, MAYBE GOD DOES EXIST.

My coffee has grown cold. The whole cup. I must be writing, in love.

I must be in love again. With memories, and all that happens. Nostalgia.

[STOMACH GROWLS

THROUGH COFFEE-SHOP WALLS]

It’s time to eat. I’ll be back. I shouldn’t keep writing EVERYTHING that comes to mind. But maybe I should.

Good Morning.

I am back, not after eating, but after busking, being chased out of a parking lot at 1 AM by a kind sheriff, and getting some sleep in another parking lot. It occurred to me this morning that I should research love stories, or stories in general, before writing up stuff like this. Maybe it would keep me in line?

Then, and with only slightly more thought, I realized that this IS the nature of some writers, myself certainly included. Some of us write from the gut, don’t look back too much. Forward either. Well, maybe, sometimes forward, but you know what I mean. We are emotional, though we see ourselves as monsters of logic. It took me years to see that what I took for being logical was just me being emotional. And that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with the way you are, ever. It’s only in the intersection of you with the others, that wrong is made.

In this case, THE OTHER is Kelly, my first true love. And she was OK with the way I am. I wish people were still OK with the way I am. Like I said, if you stay the same level of weird, you can only stand to get weirder.

So, somewhere in Colorado, we delivered small trees of great weight as the sights of elevational differences struck our eyes like the pillages of a bunch of Nordic Assholes. There we were, staring at something Florida has never had. Mountains. And it was good. And will always be good. I’m not sure what Kelly took from all of this, but it certainly made a nice impact on me, staring down at what could’ve been: an impact. It doesn’t matter where in Colorado we were. The view was nice and life was free. All else, therefore, didn’t matter.

We had love. Because that’s what it took. We held hands, kissed often, and snuck sex into all that would take it. Kind of like advertising. Since Sturgis would be the furthest we ever went from home on this trip, I can only assume that we crossed through other states. Let’s call it (Wyoming, Nebraska), since I cannot remember. It was probably Wyoming, as the mountains didn’t cease. They kept going, and we kept smiling.

The trucker remained fond of us. At least that’s how it seemed. He did indicate that Kelly might’ve had too bad a stench one time. And this rubbed me the wrong way. But once I realized he was right, and I too was included, we took a shower and averted being dropped off somewhere well outside of our intentions. Recall, it was Texas we were headed for, not Wyoming. Or Nebraska. Both aren’t Texas. And probably for the better.

So, we showered, and kept decent. We delivered trees. And experienced temps lower than anything Florida has to offer. It was cool. If anything, these climes worked to solidify our love, froze us over, to each other. The trucker too. We joked and told stories, made his travels more bearable. Learned about how long a truck can go before the DOT pulls it over, writes a ticket, and instructs the driver to go to sleep. This actually happened, B-Dubs.

That’s BY THE WAY, in case you can’t read my mind. You know, the weird have their own language. Unfortunately, these languages are non-transferable, cannot be well understood from one to the next. Autistics and ADHD’ers too. We/they have their own language, say things in rather interesting ways. If you look into the DOUBLE EMPATHY problem you’ll note that there is, in fact, a certain level of mutual understanding going on. But, when it comes to the truly weird. Man, there’s no telling.

Strugis was nice. My hair was blue. A man in the bathroom, only a few hours into our being there, said something along the lines of “Did you do that that to your hair on purpose?” I replied that I had, in fact, done that to my hair and on purpose. He asked about how easily it comes out. And I said not so easily. My guess in writing this now is that he may have had an innate desire to run the lives of others, to judge where he shouldn’t, where Jesus himself would never go. I would call this conservatism, but the neo-liberals of Boulder County, of which there are so, so many, do the same. Maybe it’s an American thing? To say things like “You eat a lot of sugary cereals,” as they sip colas having even more sugar. The goal is probably to avoid having to look inward.

Either way, this is how my first few hours in Sturgis went. Bikes were everywhere. They lined the roads. This was fucking BIKE WEEK, man. And it was nuts. What a scene! Hunter S. Thompson would have been proud to be there. Maybe even dead.

So, yeah, hogs upon hogs. Dirty dudes and their slimy chicks. And, no, I’m not judging the chicks. That’s how they actually were. This isn’t sugary cereal, and I’m not a sad-psychotic man nearing 60. The trucker had his own hog in the back. And being a man of trust issues, he made Kelly and I sleep in the back of the rig, there where the hog had been. His goal was to meet up with friends and drink some beer. Maybe get into a fight, possibly a brawl. And this he did. But I won’t go into that just yet. There’s beauty to be had first.

Kelly and I, being kids as rabbits, made love in that space where the hog was. It was utterly pulchritudinous. Her smile as I connected to her personally, was something for the paintings. Those of the greatest artists. It was cold outside, the blankets warm. The sugary sodas even colder. The scene was about like a row of bikes sitting in front of a bar, complicated and persistent. We had made love many times, but this was so far from home, different. We were so very different that night. Was it our best night ever? Yeah, maybe. Because:

There’s always maybe.

And since this story has so much more to go, I guess I will break it into two. I think to all of the events I’ve yet to describe and how much detail they have. I imagine the trip back home and all that happened once we got there, and see that this would end up much longer than I wish for it to be. So, I will.

This is everything between running away and making love under the stars of South Dakota, over cold soda. Bikes humming loudly in the background. A fight here, another there. This is all that.

The next piece I write will be the end of this trip. Then, you might understand how two teenagers deeply in love came to be two adults who haven’t talked to each other in almost two decades. A lot is between here and there. I can vividly recall the last time Kelly and I made love, and it wasn’t like what I have just described. It was cheap and involved almost no true emotional attachment. This was some years later. But, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter that you know how we ended up. What matters is that, somewhere in love, what you call time, there were two Florida teenagers who ran away, for more than two months, if only to be in said love.

I hope you’ll do me a favor and look forward to the second half of this story.

I hope you’ll reflect upon your own loves and think about picking up a pen, writing something down. If not for others to read, then maybe for love’s sake.

Life itself might just be for love’s sake.

PS — NICE appears exactly 7 times, in case you ever got to wondering. I’m exhausted from proofing this. I changed almost nothing, and it took forever.

Still, I laughed, and cried.