942 Miles

Nevada is an incredible place. It's the sort of thing that nobody realizes until they live here, and sometimes not even then. Most of Nevada is a vast, dry desert. At first glance, it can seem painfully, dully brown. On closer look however, the sun paints magnificent colors in the sky and speckles of colors exist everywhere if you know where to look for them. The quiet and the stars are magnificent.

Out of the darkness blooms cities, supernovas in the night sky, flowers stubbornly reaching for the sun through cracks in the sidewalk. The city lights ebb out, twinkling in view in an otherwise darkened sea of vast desert.

I didn't appreciate it. I should have then, as I do now, but was blinded by the people in my life who made for a bad situation. I ran away as soon as I got the chance, but it wasn't easy, and I regretted it soon thereafter.

I tried so hard to breathe steady, but every exhale was shaky and strangled as it caught in my throat, mangling it beyond comprehension and effectiveness. It was the day.

It was the day I had been dreading since I realized that being an adult meant leaving. Peter Pan has got nothing on me. Turning eighteen felt like a death sentence; graduation a walk to my own execution, and here I stood in front of the firing squad.

My father, ever the perfect actor, playing the role of "dad" was driving me to college 942 miles away. It ought to be great, I'd always hated Reno, but I'd never been very good at leaving home and this time it felt so so permanent.

I spent the morning with clasped around my throat and heart, red rimmed eyes, and a shaky unsteady feeling like the world was crumbling from beneath my feet. My whole life was packed away into a silver Nissan Altima, but even surrounded by everything I had and in a car that I owned I felt out of place. I sat in the passenger seat of my own car, not counting but noticing the passage of every single edge marker, each one like the beat of a drum.

My father steered with his knees, a cup of coffee in one hand and his cell phone in the other, chatting idly with his new wife about her pregnancy.

I slept through most of it, slipping into an unrestful slumber shortly after we stopped in Valmy, Nevada for gas. I offered to drive more than once, but my father refused. I should have insisted then, the drive may have calmed me, and my father couldn't complain later that I didn't drive, but foresight is far harder to come by than hindsight.

When I woke again, we were in Wells, and the sun was sinking into the horizon, painting the sky in orange and raspberry and grape sherbet. Everything felt hollow, emptied and scooped out like jack o'lantern not yet carved. My father had stopped at McDonald's; I hate McDonald's. He told me to order and I sat alone under too bright lights, a chill seeping in to fill the hollow place as I watched a man glance around quickly and then fill a water cup with coke. My father came back laughing, hanging up the phone with his wife, and devoured his food.

Mine tasted like ashes, or perhaps that was just my tongue and I pushed it away, hands with sweatshirt sleeves pulled down over them cradling a coke and chewing idly on the straw. My father didn't ask. I offered to drive again.

The light was gone now, our trip through Idaho shrouded in darkness. I pretended to sleep, staring out into the blackness of the fields and the slightly lightened blackness of the sky until we got to West Yellowstone and the car started veering.

I offered once more to drive. My father backed into a tiny dirt road just off the highway and shut off the car. He slept; I didn't. I sat there in the darkness, my phone opened up to no notifications and the glowing green display on the dashboard reading 2 o'clock in the morning.

When he started driving again, he tried to make conversation.

"Isn't Yellowstone beautiful," he said.

The dark, vague shapes of trees were barely discernible from the darkened sky.

"You'll come here plenty with friends, but you'll need to be brave enough to drive yourself since I won't be here," he said.

I didn't bother telling him I'd offered. I didn't bother saying any of things that I was thinking; I'd held my tongue for too many years to say them now. I let myself slip away into sleep again.

The last time that I awoke we were in Four Corners. The sky, and oh do I know now why it is called Big Sky Country, was painted in cotton candy watercolors. It felt like we had been raised up into the sky itself and it surrounded us, the cotton candy pinks and blues and purples dripping and becoming darker as they reached for the tips of the mountains.

"Here we are," he said.

For once, I didn't disagree.

Montana is an outstanding place. The skies there are beautiful, and if you haven't visited, you should. It's not home though, not for me.

My home is the cities and the desert and the mountains. It's the stifling summer heat and brisk winter chill. It's the wind and the dust and the hills and even the fire.

Driving back 942 miles through rain with two screaming cats in the backseat felt like coming home. There are places in this world where we belong, and this is mine.