Everything strange, unfamiliar familiarity. I’ve been here so many times, these roads and sidewalks, layers to a past. How long ago to remember, something new from something old. My mind a thousand miles from where it use to be spanning decades of memory. Here I am, in the same place I’ve been before, all the same and changed at once. I step between parallel worlds of identity with a slight shimmer and tilt. The magic of being youthful, the place I grew up. Did it always look so grey, or is it my adult perspective? Foreign amongst the old regular familiar belongings. A toy I haven’t touch in thirty five years. Is it still mine? Was it ever? Childhood mystery up in the trees. Shifting wind in a breeze. I should have left the map, but patience is not a virtue of the young.
Driving through thick dark night. Fog looming over long low black highway. Seventy miles an hour my mind can’t catch a true thought, split between unfocus and driving. Meeting the middle of the night with a grin. Voices on the radio echoing, trailing off, unimportant. I wasn’t paying attention anyways. Some people love the sound of their voice, talking about nothing at all.
Strange how time moves while objects and places stay the same. People caught in a loop. Things in their forever place: cities, towns, buildings, restaurants, homes, furniture, trees, people, noises, bugs chirping, the low hum of a constant distant highway out an open window, endless vehicles going somewhere like blood cells traveling through black highway veins. Motors hum the heartbeat of America.
Photos & words by Charles Denton
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