The Drive

This summer I impulsively agreed to drive the three thousand kilometers from Toronto to Calgary with my mum. It was her 57th birthday, and she asked me, and-- well-- I can't say no to people I love. It's a bad habit and I know I should fix it, but there it is. I have this silly, deep seeded, Joyce inspired ideal that love means saying yes ad infinitum. Yes I said yes I will yes, and all that.

 By nature, driving is impressionistic. Defined by speed and a deliberate, quantified, marking of time. The fleeting images of Northern Michigan were sobering in their back woods reality. The family friends we stayed with on the Manitoba/Ontario border were living out their post-Scarface existence with plenty of hash and vodka and velvet and faux gold furniture. I saw no moose but many road kill deer, beautiful in their contorted road side death. The prairies were flat as they've ever been, but passing from western Manitoba into eastern Saskatchewan is all canola fields and huge blue skies and salt flats, and it brought up the strongest surge of nostalgia I've felt in months. When Mum fell asleep I turned the radio to a cheesy country station, brought the car up to 130, and I thought about being a teenager and felt grateful and sad all at once.

Growing up in the prairies is strange. It's like always being the last kid picked for the team because you don't have a real city or an ocean or mild weather. Like being the last kid picked for the team but the first to dance because you grew up hard and beautiful and god damn it all you have the best skies. And you know every fucking word to that stupid country song about barbecue stains and white t-shirts.

Calgary always pins me down and kicks me around. It's hard to go back, again and again, to the place I've been exiled from. They know it and I know it-- I left, and when I'm back I'm never back for long, and I'm happy being away from its bullshit. I tell  2, maybe 3 people I'm there, and the rest I hope not to run into. It's easier this way: no expectations, no commitments, no drama, no conversation. Some of them, fuck, we can't even be in the same room.

We drove and drove and Canada slipped away past the windows and under the wheels and it felt like coming home and leaving home in the same moment. Returning and running, coming back to say goodbye.