After Wendover

After Wendover, driving. Pure and simple. Until the rain starts. Snow in the elevation. Or hail. I can't see. I can't see the white lanes on the roads. I pull over. I drive. I pull over. I drive. Finally, I stop in a rest area. It's freezing. The little thermometer in my car says so. I have a car full of things. I have blankets.

In the truck stop, I sleep fitfully. There are two other cars here and a line of trucks. When I wake up again and again in the night, they comfort me. Each time I wake up, I see the face of someone I know and a feeling - yes, you can love this person. And I dream, I dream that I am traveling on this summer trip to Rwanda with my teacher and he asks - are you ready? Are you sure you can do this? Something about this question has never occurred to me before. Not, are you willing? Yes. Yes. I'm willing. Can you do it? I run my mind through the dramaturgy of the trip. Different ways to be still with a memory that is very sad. Or letting in room, more room, to see everything alive now: politics, economy, entrepreneurs, delicious food, bus rides. A cacophony of presence. In the dream I don't want to answer this question, which is a dead give away for the answer: no. No.
As if I am not able to be alive.

What is that?

Trucks parked still in fog. Truckers sleep. Cold.

King talks about this. At a time when he was receiving death threats and reckoning with prioritizing his vocation or his life. He talks about how we can strive with our selves towards a thing - being part of a particular family, or ending racial injustice in America - and we can want it the way we want breathing, it can be the substance of our hearts, and still we never touch it with our hands. I do not understand what to do with the size of this disappointment. King says, inability to live, contained in life. Not a thing that pulls you out of it. King says thank god we have hearts to put something beautiful in.

Only...


At the dirt of dawn before the sun, before the real dawn, I am driving to Denver.