Scenes from an ’87 Civic
by Hadley Cooney
September 4, 2007 — Published in Verse
I was finished with this place around the time they kicked you out of
school, on academic grounds, and because you drank too much. You might
have just passed out with a whiskey bottle in this town but instead you
continued to believe there was something better out there, and maybe
this was the perfect time to find it (and I had nowhere else to go), so
I agreed. We stole off in the middle of the June night without telling
anyone, just for dramatic effect. We were pleased with ourselves: it
was as we had read about in books, an epic voyage West, and we
drove all night on roads bathed in street light until we had driven so
far that we couldn’t turn back and still live with ourselves. Your car
smelled like beach motel, sunscreen and cigarettes and I complained
but loved it, and it almost felt like home. As nameless highway miles
passed we began to remember the place we inched away from and wondered
why we hadn’t left years ago. They no longer wanted you at that school
and it made sense, really; you were of a different age, and things
would never change. Never change in that they would always change, and
all you wanted was a moment of stillness, to sink your roots into the
ground, yesterday’s ground, because you were yesterday and each subtle
change turned your stomach until you had to close your eyes. And I
just wanted to be anywhere you were, though I didn’t know it then and
believed, perhaps childishly, that I was chasing something bigger than
love, if such a thing is to be found amongst the western sky.
Eventually all we could hear were the wheels and the tape turning, and
our silence was heavy and empty and strange. We stared out the window
to avoid looking at one another, knowing nothing for certain but the
depths of our ignorance, eighteen miles from the state line.
I began counting road markers and in a way it felt like New Year’s,
counting down the seconds in the vain hope that everything will change
when time and life are really static and yet transitory, and what
you’re looking for is long gone. Still, we were feeling celebratory,
and right before we crossed into a foreign land we stopped at the gas
station and split a coke and half a pack of cigarettes. It was
nighttime. We were sitting on the dirty curb and the cold seeped
through my jeans. I dreamed of neon signs beyond the shallow
border, and maybe gas is cheaper there and maybe life is slower there,
or maybe everything is just the same. We screamed out open windows
anyway, competing with the wind; we had left our shells behind.
Days passed and states passed and we were wasted tired but continued
dreaming, the awake kind, like a choose your own ending novel, the
ones we’d read as kids. Each new window frame was as horrible and
beautiful as each window frame had always been, and we wanted to hold
them all, but we were driving too fast. And soon we saw that there was
nothing there, that beauty was ephemeral and when you stopped, everything was ugly again.
Two more borders and our surroundings changed: the plains grew upward
to heaven scraping mountains, and it looked the way evolution must
have, and the air was colder and we had to close the windows.
Reflective green signs gave away the secret name of our new town, and
you wrote it down in a black notebook that you stored under the seat.
This feels like a turning point, you said, marking the date and time
with a dying ballpoint pen. It was sunset then, and we stopped for a moment,
growing weary of watching scenery from dirty windows. We are nothing
compared to the mountains and sky, and someday in the photographs we took
to prove our existence we will just be scattered blurs polluting landscape. Though
we acknowledged it in no way, twenty miles ago we had ended the search
and all we could do was move forward. In an empty highway diner the
waitress bought us coffee, and there was nothing left, and there was
everything left. We made a toast to nihilism and slipped into your car
and watched what seemed like the same square of asphalt dance under us
for hours, and there it was, your stillness.
Illustration by Anatole Upart.
Hadley Cooney
Hadley Cooney is a student of literature, philosophy, and politics at a tiny college in the heart of the universe. A frequent patron and employee of used bookstores, she splits her time and sensibilities between New York City and Washington, DC.
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