Sometimes I feel like if I can reach high enough, I can tear off part of a cloud, and for a moment, I can trick myself into thinking that it’s more than just water vapor and chemistry and science and things that make sense; and maybe I can feel the cotton candy hung up in the air.
They string the sky as we drive and listen to the gray honda civic playlist on spotify. The soft vibrations of the engine, the whispers of the wheels as cars float past. The road pulses with an alien heartbeat, and you can try to convince me that the road isn’t alive, but I know it hums to thousands of songs, feels the weight of a million dreams, meets more people than you or I ever will. It will know people’s habits—when they oversleep their alarm, when they’re on their way to a conference in a car made to carry fewer things than it currently has. It will know from the walk of the tires and the tired engines countless days and countless stories.
It will hold a newborn child on its way to see the place it will call home just as it will for the girl who feels the weight of too many worlds on her shoulders.
Wheel in one hand, she breathes in the world, and the freeway tells her the thousands of stories it has heard and been part of—and tells her that she’s one if it’s favorite stories. Rolling the windows down, it speaks louder and louder, filling the car with its cornucopia of narratives. The stories whip around her, touching her face, filling her lungs, and her hair falls like autumn leaves on her neck.
And as the highway calls and she drives on and on, cotton candy clouds will freckle the endlessly blue sky. For just a moment, she’ll convince herself that they’re not an accumulation of water droplets dotting the atmosphere and that really it’s cotton candy lining the skies.
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