April 21, 2023 - “Your windshield became the rain”

In your hometown that winter we went driving at night and the headlights looked like half ovals dancing in circles against the trees that were always just around the next corner. We tried holding our breath all the way up the hill before the High-Smith bridge, but the ocean reach was too long. We could breathe all the way in, but there wasn’t enough time to breathe all the way out before the night’s swirl would descend into the highway once more. The clouds become the fog; the fog became your windshield; your windshield became the rain; the rain became the sound of the car’s tires stopping almost too late. Then the pavement became years later: then years later became a man in his sixties with his greyhound walking alongside the road at dawn, whistling the chorus from one of those songs, from one of those decades that was always on one of those radio stations that you always liked listening to, while driving at night.