Time puts the weights into my heart. Then it gets in my head, and it tears it apart. But if time is my vessel for this physical life, then learning to love must be my way back to breath. You played me out, so I gave you up.
And you were much in the same place as me. Left broken by the things that time took from you. But time doesn't stop, even when you're too numb to move. So we press on.
And we can find new ways of living. We can top the old times. When the loving that you've wasted comes raining down, you get out of town. In order to feel nothing, you keep moving. You keep seeing new things, and they fill you, if only for a moment.
We moved through snow and rain. From Greenville, to Cave City, to Louisville, to Nashville, to Massanutten.
We see what we can during the day, then drink ourselves into the deepest sleep. Nothing is like it was in New York. Everyone is so weird. Everything is so simple.
I'll probably never see this places again, but I didn't realize it then. I was so caught up in feeling nothing, that I felt everything so completely. I saw everything with eyes pressed wide open. From Walmart to the backstreet bars of Nashville. I was present and content. Wandering fills the soul in a way nothing else does. A new place, a new face, and twizzlers for dinner washed down by drugstore wine.
Winding roads through mountains, and hours spent staring out the window to the worst music. I'm talking radio songs. Enough country music to last me till my dying day. Water-parks and snow trapping us into roadside hotels.
The end of a road-trip is like coming down off a high. A fall back into everything that is a familiar and an inability to function within it. And I don't know what to make of it all.
photos by Spencer Wohlrab