{"id":17032,"date":"2022-01-10T05:00:01","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/?p=17032"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:09:45","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:09:45","slug":"epistle-from-the-passengers-seat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/creative-nonfiction\/epistle-from-the-passengers-seat\/","title":{"rendered":"Epistle from the Passenger’s Seat"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If anything, I wish the clouds would play sunset again, but it\u2019s night now, fourteen hours of travel behind us. I blame the skyscape for distracting us, for taking the deep conversations we could have had but didn\u2019t have and creating instead chunky stretches of silence that felt both curiously comfortable and cautiously enlightening. It\u2019s not that I didn\u2019t want to dig deeper, to question and consult, to listen and learn and unburden, but it was sweet to share space and listen to the clouds share silent poems with their mountaintop wisps of wonder and condensation.<\/p>\n

After many long hours trapped inside the cab of the moving truck, I wonder why we kept on so quiet, why we didn\u2019t commit ourselves to cutting away at life\u2019s layers, to father-son storytelling, but we know how those types of talks can so easily morph into militant reminders of mortality.<\/p>\n

And, anyway, it\u2019s night now. We\u2019re exhausted.<\/p>\n

For the last highway hour, you take the wheel and fight sleep with music. The truck is barebones, radio only, so we listen to a cheap Bluetooth speaker we balance on the cup holder, which sounds horribly hollow and underwater. I put on American Football and you ask if I ever listened to Neil Young. I change up the music and we listen to Old Man<\/em> and, man, if I didn\u2019t cry my eyes out. I should have told you I was crying but it was dark and easy to disguise. It was nighttime, after all.<\/p>\n

Maybe it could have been a moment or maybe it was already a moment without bringing it up. Soon, you\u2019re singing Heart of Gold<\/em> and we\u2019ve only got twenty more minutes until we\u2019re off the highway and can rest until morning. And as much as I want out of this damn truck, to shit and shower and sleep, I want so badly for us to crash headfirst into a wormhole and time travel back to sunset. Orange and pink and persimmon. The glitches we saw in the sky, the almost-clouds. A time when time wasn\u2019t time at all but all color and calm.<\/p>\n

Because time is irrelevant until it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Time passes and we are old.<\/p>\n

Nighttime happens like clockwork.<\/p>\n

Earlier, the sky was tangerine and sugar and it felt like we were floating. At one time, we could feel each molecule in our bodies, each atom in this tiny space, and each moment together flipped like a page of an oversized atlas. But it\u2019s nearly pitch black on the roads now. We don\u2019t feel anything but cranky.<\/p>\n

A voice interrupts the music. It\u2019s not mine or yours or Neil Young\u2019s. It\u2019s the GPS, direct and robotic. It speaks awful things: an exit ahead, a turn, a destination. About how infinity was never ours to begin with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…I want so badly for us to crash headfirst into a wormhole and time travel back to sunset. Orange and pink and persimmon. The glitches we saw in the sky, the almost-clouds. A time when time wasn\u2019t time at all but all color and calm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[760],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-nonfiction","writer-adam-gianforcaro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17032"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17047,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17032\/revisions\/17047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}