Kinetic, Not Potential
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I used to drive around Grand Rapids.
Or be driven, same difference. A good amount of my time in that city was spent
in a car. When I go back now, out of force or duty, it is the roads I remember,
the intersections and the stoplights and the conversations so intricately tied
to them.
Grand Rapids became my home when
college became my life. I left the familiar southeast region, Detroit's wide
delta, and ventured into what was, to my small-town childhood, a large city. My
family and I unloaded my life into the 8x10 room and we drove to the nearest
Meijer on 28th Street. Four lanes of traffic! Oh my. Not the nicest part of
town—open 24 hours but I wouldn't come here late at night on your own….
Which is what I did two nights later. If you struggle talking to people you do
not know, if you are awkward and unsure and too aware, retreat is the best—no,
most viable—option. And my car, a 1986 Olds 88 with red velour interior, offered
the armor I couldn't give myself. Not only did I drive to this Meijer on my own,
I drove back taking Kalamazoo and every other side street that looked dark and
sketchy. This was the first of many meandering, meaningless drives that came to
define my college years. Those moments, though, illustrate the whole of that
era: squandered potential, confinement for the sake of confinement, going
forward to avoid sitting still.
And still I shut the door.
At some point during that first year,
I discovered Erica joining me: grocery shopping, afternoon tea, midnight treks
down Fulton. Crazy hippie pot smoker with friends who drank and Lord only knows
how I came to hang out with them, but we got along. Her home only seven minutes
away, we drove the streets and she gave me tours, commenting with her childhood
tales, her Catholic Central years, her father-who-isn't pain. She showed me what
was beneath the new condominiums and apartment buildings. You cannot imagine
what the farmhouse here looked like is a cinema and Cold Stone Creamery.
All fields. We brought our sleds here in the winter and he'd pull us behind him
parks SUVs.
But she and her car and her Ani
DiFranco cds did not return that second year; we replace and are replaced.
Sad(not heartbreaking). She was no longer there, I became the driver; my own
stories started to form. And now—it is so easy to remember so many, many rides
in/through/around Grand Rapids: visits from Mom for a Dean's List brunch;
driving home friends who lived off campus; late-night coffee house visits to
discuss the possibility/probability of actions A-D, relationship F; YMCA for
work, dinner from Subway; commuting to concerts in Chicago/Detroit/Cleveland why
not; 7-11 slurpees & peanut butter m&m medicine for stupid boys.
I guess there was, usually, a point
to those trips. It may have taken an hour to drive the mile to and from Meijer,
but we were heading somewhere, hoping to arrive and return wiser and full. These
are the moments that make up my college existence, not parties or keggers or
classes or spring breaks. Not even proper road trips. The simple act of being in
a car traveling sum distance three miles in too many ways defined my life. And
the cars I remember as well: a broken-down red Camaro, an old white Honda, a
dark maroon Jeep Cherokee. They carted us in strange metal wombs, and each
entrance and exit mattered.
Not so with him.
It wasn't the entrance or the exit
because there was no destination or purpose. There was no concrete beginning or
end; each time was a continuation of the one before.
That first car ride involved his
friend and a concert and gummy bears—or worms? Maybe peach rings. What I
remember most is the return trip from Allendale, the farm-coated streets
brightening slowly urban as I listened to him talk: I don't think I've heard
someone this honest before…
he allows himself to sound…
he's unguarded.
People talk like this in person?
I think I love him.
I had thought I loved him for awhile
previous (not quite a year, but close). First impressions—love, honesty—press on
us; we revert back to them even when evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.
He and I drove, a lot. His energy—intense, awkward, incessant—meant he couldn't
sit still in an apartment. In a car there are distractions, in a car you do not
have to hold eye contact, in a car you can change the subject easily. My
hockey games were here and My posh cousins live here and Listen to
this song…. In a car you are meant to wear seat belts, which I didn't. In a
car you go through the drive through—extra pickles on the burger, please—and you
hold the driver's food while he decides where to go because there's this tension
between the two of you and it's physical palpable panting but he has to drive a
car and you're holding some weird burrito thing? so you cannot stop and—and
what? And what has been suggested, curtained, imagined. And what
is everything. I know what it is, but I hesitate to trust myself. I hold his
food in my hands and trace the outline of his face with my eyes. I want him to
touch my leg, again. I want him to touch.
I know
you know?
I know where we can go
I know where we can go
my grandparents are in Florida
we can stop there, their house
I can eat
my food
So you stop and the car stops and
you're actually buckled up for once as you hold this burrito thing that's cold
now, so you ask. Do you want it, your food? Offer it like a communion wafer,
only one that requires both hands. No… No I don't want it! Just, put it
there.
We. It's dark because there are no
lights because his grandparents are in Florida and he's turned off the car so
that drivers do not see so you do not see anything outside the windows, just
inside. He stares ahead, leaning forward, almost hugging the steering wheel.
You—I—Wait.
We talked about it…
But you've talked about so much, and it's
been now nearly 14 months. Fourteen months of talking and waiting and
loveorsomething. Of driving and arguing and talking, so much fucking Jesus
Christ talking in a car that's moving but not, not really, going absolutely
nowhere just around these stupid Grand Rapids streets with the Calder pictures
on the left-side of the street signs that you hate because you hate art. Art:
you hate art, and you hate fighting, and you hate the way this past week has
gone, this past month oh the whole past. All of it, as aimless as the driving:
meandering paths that go nowhere, for once I'd like to go somewhere,
somewhere! I've all this goddamned energy building up inside and the
carburetor or some other poor simile isn't working right, isn't converting it.
What I wouldn't give for movement, real movement!
But no. I'm sitting in this black January night next to a boy
who's almost hugging a steering wheel. I'm buckled in a stationary car. There
isn't snow, there isn't light, there isn't anything but words. I am joyfulscared
because I know what he wants. I know what is going to happen?
We talked about it….
And you are not driving anywhere in the car
this time, but you are moving forward. A most important trip, the most important
trip. I am moving forward, and we touch—we kiss so awkwardly beautiful, perfect.
We kiss!, we touch;
we replace and are replaced
I used to drive around Grand Rapids. Or be driven—the
difference is everything, and I preferred the latter
I prefer the latter.
Next:
Michigan Hugs!
Kristen Kaniewski
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Battle Creek Emma Rasegan