One warm line

I'm in chicago, being thoroughly taken care of by my dear friend pamela, who just made me a bowl of buttery salty popcorn and left me to read for a while. So far on this trip I've slept in already familiar beds, tracing a one known line. 857 km is barely a dent in the map. But I did cover a stretch of michigan I don't remember seeing before, scrubby with intense cloudbursts and many lurking speedcops. Today was mostly listening to david sedaris, being a little dreamy, driving in as relaxed a way as you can when the cargo is shifting uneasily behind you and you're wondering if the bike is puncturing a painting and the clouds are opening up violently and unexpectedly. I realize I still find toll roads weirdly exotic, attached to the kind of gleeful excitement I felt when I first started driving the NYS thruway to in the Pursuit of Romance.

Threaded through the day of mundane drive is an undercurrent of sorrow about bp's health. P showed me a dvd interview of her mom one of her students did shortly before her mom died, and we cycled again through the "so vibrant one minute, gone six months later" sense of shock. I was thinking that this past few months is the first time I think I've really been conscious of aging. Not for any tangible or "rational" reason, but just a sensation that there are only so many five year chunks in one's life, and I may have edged toward having fewer left than behind me. The thwarted interlude with the married poet was another chink in this sense -- the idea that after a certain point, the potential for new connections and sustained intimacy becomes thinner. And then if you find someone you become truly enmeshed with... well, the possible narratives that could fan out have the horrible potential to look like bp's -- life that becomes truly joyful, then dashed to the ground by a turncoat body.

Despite this undertow, I *am* feeling increasingly hopeful as I head west. The chokingly humid run with beth this morning reminded me of what I want to leave behind -- something cloying, something sticky, the churn of leftover stories -- and what I want to run toward.