Road Trip Blues: Part 4

Abilene, Texas to Albuquerque, New Mexico (491 miles//7.5 hours)

This post is a series.

If you haven’t read the night before Sam left, part 1, part 2, and part 3, I suggest you start there. 🫶

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The crazy truth about driving your future husband across the country is that you physically experience how far he will be from you. Every mile you drive is another one pulling him closer to his new home and farther away from the one you made together. You feel the entire continent, its grooves and terrain, that will sit between you and the man that you love for days, weeks, years on end.

He is no longer a 30 minute walk away like he was in the early days.

He isn’t 12-feet away like he was during the pandemic.

Suddenly, my reality, my understanding of my future, bodyslams me. It starts to really settle how much physical exertion is required to be together again.

Maybe I disassociated those first few days of our road trip---I slipped into my daydreaming tendencies and pretended that this was just a cute little drive, willfully ignoring all of Sam’s stuff behind me in the car.

But, by the fifth day living in the car, I couldn’t take it anymore. And now, with our compass pointed towards New Mexico, we were closer to our destination than our departure.

Texas stomped its heavy boots on my daydreams, and I woke up clear-eyed and petrified.

Reality started crashing around me, and I started to crash out.

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When we woke up that morning, my sour mood from the night before had fully curdled. We left the hotel room. I mutter and huff and puff about schlepping all of my stuff AGAIN, back and forth from car to hotel, car to hotel. Before I exit, I grab a bunch of the free food from the hotel buffet.

I don’t understand the female impulse to cram 16 loose items in your hands and forearms simultaneously. However, I was not zen enough to stop myself.

A craze so wild swept over me. There was no way for me to recall anyone or any details passing by me, the music playing, the layout of the building. All I could feel was the building pressure inside of me, that kept pounding the side of my brain as I tried with all my might to KEEP IT THE FUCK TOGETHER.

I don’t want this to come off like I can’t talk to Sam. I can tell him EVERYTHING. My fiance is the world’s greatest listener. It comes to him naturally and has been honed over his years of storytelling and producing. I have never had to sensor my feelings or feel like I am too much for him.

But the situation we had placed ourselves in was a whole other level.

Our ambitions and wishes were in direct opposition to each other.

We were SO stressed about money. Our opportunities both happened so quickly and close to each other, which made us SO disoriented. It felt like the last rope cast, pulling us up from financial ruin given that we had been living in a state of deep uncertainty since November.

Right there, in the Texas parking lot, I didn’t have that perspective or distance from the situation.

All I had was pure,

unadulterated,

rage.

As I get to the car and start to put all my stuff away, I place a plastic bowl of Cheerios on the roof of the car.

Not the ones with a yellow lid on top.

Just an open air, plastic bowl.

Naturally, because I am outside in Texas, a large wind swept through, and my unsteady bowl of Cheerios blew over and sprinkled the parking lot.

At any other point, this would not have been a big deal. But, I yelled as if I dropped a baby.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

I was as fried as an egg.

Sam can tell I am upset about something. You can’t pay me to hide my feelings for a Jeff Bezos amount of money. Sam can always sense when I’m upset, but, honestly, it didn’t take a Rhode Scholar to see that I was pissed. I stomped around like a toddler who didn’t have the words yet to express what was wrong. I leave my cereal to the wind, get inside, and slam the car door. Sam starts the car and pulls out of the parking lot, heading West.

I think he knew that my feelings were starting to boil. We had both been sitting on the Pandora’s box of our feelings that kept violently knocking up against the lid, begging to be opened. For weeks, Sam and I had been sitting on it with all our emotional body weight, forcing the lid to stay shut.

But my madness busted through, and everything came flying out with it.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Sam asks gently.

What’s wrong?!

WHAT’S WRONG?!?!

EVERYTHING IS FUCKING WRONG!!!!!!!!

My eyes glare at the road Carrie style. I wish I could light the road on fire with my eyes.

My lips purse. I take a breath.

“I’m going to say something that is going to upset you.”

“Okay....”

“I am starting to resent this trip,” I said.

Sam clams up, and I can see the anger rising in him like a thermostat.

“Can I just explain what I mean before you jump to conclusions?”

“....yes,” Sam says tightly, eyes fixed straight ahead on the road, knuckles white on the steering wheel.

“I am so tired and my body hurts and all this sitting and driving is exhausting and I’m cramped and tired of living in a different room every night.”

Soon I’m not talking anymore, I’m crying/screaming. The words vomit out of me, messy and jumbled and fill the car.

“I feel like we have all this wedding stuff to do but I can’t think and be in the car at the same time so it just piling up and then whenever we get somewhere I’m too tired to do anything and just am vegging out and staring at my phone and I hate that I can’t even drive and I hate all of this sitting. And I hate that I basically get one day of recovery before I go to my new job which is also just as important and I feel like it’s not taken as seriously.

And I hate that I’m the one who is basically going to have to be going back and forth all the time because you need to be in the office five days a week. Arizona is so FUCKING far away.

I feel like we didn’t really talk about this or it’s all just hitting me now. I am the one who has to be on more planes and put my body in more discomfort in order to see each other. I didn’t sign up for this!!! WE ARE SO STRESSED.

AND I DON’T WANT TO BE FAR AWAY FROM YOU! WHY ARE WE CHOOSING TO BE FAR AWAY FROM EACH OTHER?!!!!!!!”

I SCREAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMM.

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I had a hard time breathing between words. I took big gasps like I had been holding my breath underwater for far to long.

I’m not saying that Sam was having a great time either. As he drove through the flat town,

“Look, no part of me wants to be doing this alone. But there are NO JOBS in New York, and this has been my DREAM to be on the radio. And I PLANNED this whole trip. I got us all the hotel rooms. I sold all my equipment, so I could pay for everything. I know that you will have to take more flights honey, but we will figure it out. I know that it’s going to take a lot for you to come out and I appreciate that but don’t be mad at me for the situation we are in. And I don’t want to be away from you either, you’re my FAVORITE person. I want to MARRY YOU. And I’m just as freaked out as you are.”

We pull up to a stop sign, and Sam halts. He turns to me.

I put my head in my hands, knees on thighs.

“But we are going to figure this out because we both have really amazing opportunities ahead of us and I want this for you too honey, I want you to thrive because you worked so hard and you earned it. This is all really scary but we are going to figure it out. Okay? I love you more than anything.”

I whimper and gasp between breaths. I cannot stop crying. I look up through the window and my clouded vision.

The sky is so big and blue. Why can’t this be a fun trip? Why do I feel like my insides are being ripped apart? This might be the most insane thing I have ever done. I continued to gasp, mouth open, runny nose between breaths.

“I love you more than anything,” I whimper, my chin quivering. I feel delirious and angry and beaten down. I’m already exhausted by 9:27am.

I become a mouth breather because my nose is so clogged. My cheeks and neck are wet from the healthy waterfall of tears. My face, most likely, is red and puffy.

I sigh. I take a sip of water. I feel so dried out as I look at the Texas plains. They make me more thirsty.

Sam squeezes my thigh as we stay at this stop sign. There is no one around us. No one beeping at us to hurry up, what is taking so long? We can stay here idling as long as we like.

I lean in and kiss him. My tears run into our mouths, and our kisses are salty. I regain my breath. I put my forhead to his.

I feel a little better now that I got all of that off my chest. A weight lifted, despite all the physical baggage still weighing down the car.

I look out at the plains, dry and brittle and endless. Part of me just wants us to move to Texas and forgo our dreams. Make new identities for ourselves, work at a little coffeeshop or a bar and make a little home to come back to every night.

But Sam and I cannot ignore the thunder of ambition that rattles inside of us every day. It wakes us up in the morning and makes it hard to sleep at night. I know who we are and a quiet life is not for us just yet. So, instead, Sam turns left, and we keep heading west.

It starts to really feel West now. The land is so flat around us a bubble in a leveler would have been perfectly centered if we set it down.

The landscape rusts. I stare out the window. The sun seems eternally on here.

I try taking pictures, but it just flattens and dulls every image. It can’t grasp the height and rich red hues of the mesas passing us by. The slabs of rock layered like a cake.

We watch the land get grander and grander, wider and wider, bigger and bigger. All we have in front of us is the curve of the earth flexing out ahead of us.

As our drive reaches an end, the blue and red blurs out into a lavender haze in the far far far off distance. I sit with my arms crossed, calmer now, but still resenting every mile we traverse over, designed to keep us apart.

Podcasts later, we cross the border into New Mexico.

Arizona is the next state over.

Fuck.

This post is a series.

If you haven’t read the night before Sam left, part 1, part 2, and part 3, I suggest you start there. 🫶

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Next: Road Trip Blues: The Final Day