I walked toward the shower and my feet were light. My hands tingled. My brain was alive, and a voice filled my head. It was strong, and it was clear, and it repeated one thing.
Go, it said.
Go. Go.
I stopped where I was, and looked down at my bare feet on the hardwood floor. I glanced around the room, at the TV on the far wall, at the matching nightstands, at the minimalist, black, angular decor.
Go, it said.
I looked at my briefcase sitting on the floor, papers spilling out. I thought of the other stacks of papers that would be waiting on my desk when I got to work.
Go.
I could almost smell the sweat on the subway, feel the humidity as bodies packed together and pushed against mine. I heard babies crying, cabs honking, and office phones ringing.
Go.
I closed my eyes tight, and I saw mountains. I saw jagged, snowy peaks that cut straight through a blue sky. I saw rolling foothills before them, blanketed in lush pines and divided by a river running through them. I saw winding two-lane roads and little standalone shops. I heard birds and the howl of a coyote, and silence. I heard silence. I smelled the outdoors, things not from the human world but the natural one. I saw, heard, and smelled all these things, even though I never had.
Go, it said. Go.
So I did.
I walked to the closet and pulled out a duffel bag, and I began packing.
I did my best to explain myself, but this was a weak effort. I knew nothing other than I had to go. After she awoke, there was a lot of crying, some yelling, a little pouting, then more crying.
“Will this just be for a little while?” she asked at one point, eyes puffy and voice hoarse, trying to salvage something.
“I can’t say that,” I said.
“Fuck you, Jules.”
Briefly I considered bringing her along, or proposing the idea, at least. I could tell her we’d get out of the city. I’d leave my job, and we’d find a quieter place to live. There wouldn't be any country clubs or social status like she craved in Connecticut, and money would be tight for a while, but we’d figure it out. I could spin it as a new adventure, the two of us together, finding our rightful place in the world, exploring something outside the same thirty congested city blocks. I could really sell it.
The problem was, she would say yes. It would take some convincing, but in the end she would come with me. And she would be miserable. She would come along and try to make it work, mostly due to blind marital allegiance and a crippling fear of being alone. And she would hate the new life we found, and would resent me for asking her to go, and I would resent her for going. It was a failed proposition from the start.
Megan and I no longer shared a path in life, and denying that would be a disservice to us both. She was better off without me. I repeated this thought in my head and it brought me a small amount of comfort.
3
I drove for three days. The first was the longest, through a sliver of New York, then Jersey, then a long trek across the expansive fields of Pennsylvania. The landscape changed quickly, evening out from walls of skyscrapers to lines of trees and rolling hills, then stayed that way. It seemed unending. I stopped for a burger outside Pittsburgh.
In the afternoon I crossed into Ohio and began the uncharted territory. The driving was easy, the heat manageable. As I crossed that open land, the miles of highway and dirt and grass and trees and signs and occasional towns, I rolled up my sleeves and scanned the radio, looking for some bluegrass or Americana. I stopped at a truck stop outside Columbus and admired my country, the sights and smells of it all that I’d missed most of my life. I washed my face and moved along.
The final leg of the day crossed me into Indiana, and the industrial city of Indianapolis, where I stayed for the night. I checked in at a cheap motel that advertised its rates on a sign, and ate a chicken sandwich at a diner across the parking lot.
In the morning I slept. I slept soundly, quietly, wonderfully, in that cheap queen bed, until the scandalous hour of 8:30 a.m., when I was gently roused by the lingering scent of stale cigarettes. There was an alarm clock in the room but I didn’t use it. I sat up on the bed, rubbed my eyes, and saw a missed call from Megan. No voicemail.
I refilled my duffel bag with the few belongings I’d removed, put on a t-shirt and shorts, and hit the road, pointed west again. The duffel bag sat in the back seat, holding my only belongings, a small reminder of the many things I’d left and the few things I’d brought. Before long I was in Missouri.
It was almost amazing to me that there was this great expanse of country that I had been aware of but scarcely considered. All of this land, hundreds and hundreds of miles, in my own country, that I’d all but ignored my entire life. It wasn’t the northeast. It wasn’t New York or Boston or Philly or some Ivy League town. So it didn’t matter. Indeed, the drive was monotonous at times, but there was a beautiful simplicity to it. Even the farm country, with the endless fields of corn and soybeans, the scattered windmills and occasional red-sided barns, had a wholesome glow, a serene sense of purpose. This was America. This was the America I’d missed while holing myself up in the only area of America that was supposed to matter.
This day on the road was shorter than the last, and by five o’clock I was in Kansas City. I paid for a room at the Marriott downtown and ate the finest rack of ribs of my life. I called Megan back from the hotel but she did not answer.
My last day of driving took me across Kansas, past hundreds of miles of wheat, through the city of Topeka and by a different Manhattan, over a state that once again seemed impossibly large, to Colorado. I reached the border and pulled to the side of the road.
Welcome to Colorful Colorado
It’s what the sign read. Confusing, to me, because I didn’t see much of anything colorful, and I was fairly certain I wasn’t even seeing Colorado. Behind me was brown grassland and thorny shrubs, as far as I could see, and in front of me, the same.
When I was ten years old, I had flipped through a magazine at my parents’ home in Boston. It was one of my dad’s car monthlies, Motor Trend or Car & Driver or something similar, which I’d often pick up and peruse while waiting for dinner. Mostly I didn’t bother with the words, but enjoyed looking at the images of fast cars and ads for razors and cologne. As I turned the pages on this particular evening, I stopped on a page of blue and white. It was a different kind of ad, not one promoting Ford or Chevy or Gillette, but a simple image. Blue and white. Deep blue sky and snow covered mountains, shimmering in the midday sun in some other universe. Find Your Freedom, was printed in block letters at the bottom, followed by short information for Colorado ski vacations.
I bugged my mother for a year. Can we go? Can we please go? Even at ten years old, I felt the pull of adventure, the call of uncharted land and the mystery that was Colorado. Colorado. The very word sounded like a western fairytale. Having never been west of Pittsburgh, the thought conjured images of foreign utopia, a place nearly inaccessible, in a way that can only happen in the mind of a ten-year-old. Colorado. It dominated my mind. I doodled mountains on my notebook paper in school, and visualized the open countryside while lying in bed at night. I knew nothing more of the place than a single picture in a magazine, but my imagination created the rest. Colorado. The thought alone was magical.