FlashNano 25 Day 3: Alone on an empty highway

 FlashNano25

Day 3

Prompt: You are alone on an empty highway. 

 

Being an American girl, she was raised on promises. Yes, every breath you take, she was told, can lead you to wide open spaces, where there’s room to make your big mistakes. 

Carefree highway let me slip away on you, she thinks, pedal on metal, from California to the New York island. And the cornfields, so many cornfields. Bright lights. Big cities too, teeming with life. Like me, wretched refuse yearning to be free. That’s some proof. If you build it, they will come.

Gotta keep rolling and must keep riding, even if sometimes feels like I’m on the highway to hell. 

I go to the mountains. Drink from the fountains. There’s more than one answer. But thinking in terms like roads and driving, lyrics and phrasing, those guiderails help frame my thoughts, while I move on from town to town. 

Every day is a winding road that brings me closer to feeling fine.  There are bumps, sure. Detours too. But if I waited for perfection, I would never write a word. 

So many stories of where I’ve been and how I’ve got to where I am. It’s a little overwhelming, but in a good way. 

It’s a truth, universally acknowledged by some women raised to want more, that an empty highway can be full of promises. 

I count the miles in paragraphs, race medals, tolls – and wow some of those tolls have worn me down. . . 

Still, I pick myself up. I want to go out tonight. I want to find out what I got. Stumbling, fumbling toward ecstasy, one word, mile, breath at a time. 

I fill the tank. Study the odometer. Check my compass. Then fingers to wrist verify what I already know. Pulse is still strong. Country roads, I demand, take me home. Where’s that though?  So many miles to go before I sleep. I’d walk 500 miles. Scratch that. I’ll run/ walk and drive 500 miles and 500 more, because I’m not dead yet and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.  

 

 

 

 

(Mishmash of lyrics and quotes, some misremembered, from:  Tom Petty, The Police, Dixie Chicks, Gordon Lightfoot, Woody Guthrie, Ceelo Green, Emma Lazarus, Field of Dreams, Bob Seger, AC/DC, The Indigo Girls, Bad Company, Cheryl Crow, Margaret Atwood, Brandi Carlile, Jane Austen, Bruce Springsteen, Sarah Mclachlan, John Denver, Robert Frost, The Proclaimers, Monty Python, U2)