Route 66, with him
We took Route 66 out past the broken signs and sun-bleached towns where nothing ever quite leaves and nothing ever really stays and I thought of Paris,
how I found him there, or how he found me, standing under some dim café light
Leopoldo with the blue eyes that never sit still, Italian voice rolling through English like it’s just another road to take fast, saying baby we go, always we go
and he came all the way out here for it, for me, for the long stretch of heat and desert and nothing in between
Phoenix didn’t feel like a wrong turn with him in the car
not this time
we drove with the windows down and money not meaning a thing except gas in the tank and rooms we barely stayed in, laughing at it, leaving before it settled, young enough to think it always stays like this old enough to know better
he leaned over the wheel sometimes the way they do when they love the drive more than the destination, talking fast about everything
Rome, Paris, some future place we hadn’t named yet
and I didn’t need to catch every word
just the rhythm of it
just him
we stopped somewhere off the highway where the sky went on forever, no end to it, stars coming in slow like they had all the time in the world and for once I wasn’t thinking about mistakes or what it cost me to get here
because standing there with him
it didn’t feel like I landed wrong
it felt like I passed through exactly where I was supposed to
like the road had been waiting for us to catch up to it
and whatever this is
this reckless, expensive, wide-open thing
it works
because it’s him
and the rest of the world can figure itself out
Bleu de minuit 