Drive

There’s a car — nothing fancy, just the functional kind of thing people drive for a few years after college — rambling east down a highway in one of those parts of the country where the horizon is an endless thing. The sun is rising, and has been for a while now, burnt orange spreading around the edges of the world and embracing it as the deep blue of early day pushes back the star-filled night. In one of those moments that is always missed, the sun has drawn up over the edge of the earth and is stretching out over the dusty dashboard, fingers tapping the windshield and cracking into a thousand points of glare.

There’s a quarter-cup of cold, gas-station coffee in a cheap plastic holder that hangs from the inside of the driver’s door and a matching twin — empty though — on the passenger’s side. The car isn’t cold, but it’s only as warm as you can keep a car when you’ve been driving through the dark hours of early morning and doing everything you can to stay awake. The radio is on, but the volume’s down and the only sounds are something tuneless that hints at familiarity, periodically interrupted by muttering DJs or a corny advertisement that is mercifully incoherent.

The young man in the driver’s seat wants a cigarette, but he can’t smoke in the car and he can’t pull over, and the reason he can’t do either is stretched out on the fully-reclined passenger’s seat and fast asleep.

He looks over at her from time-to-time in glances that would betray too much if she were awake, and he argues with himself over whether or not to wake her. He should have woken her an hour or more ago to switch and have her drive, but she is perfect asleep.

Asleep, she looks no different than she ever has when she was ever asleep. If he wakes her though... you can know a person and not recognize their eyes. He couldn’t sleep right now anyway.

He hears something he likes in the radio’s muttering and turns the volume up just enough to make it out. The song is a soft kind of sunrise, early-morning, driving-appropriate song, but one that makes him think more of past Autumns than the coming Spring. For a minute, he can taste cider and smell bonfires and baked pumpkin seeds. He glances at her again and is lost there, has to force himself to look back at the road.

The light has just begun to touch the edge of her hair where it tucks behind her ear. It’s a thing he’s seen so many times when he knew he should etch the image into his memory — and he did. He prized those moments just as he should have, but it’s not as useful a thing as people will tell you, because it can never be more than a memory once the moment is gone. And, really, anything dwelled on for its passing is missed for what it is. It's just taking a picture to remember something you weren't there for because you were too busy taking pictures.

In that moment, she's so — but it’s pointless to say “she's beautiful,” when you aren’t just talking about a stranger with pleasantly-arranged features. There’s a way some people feel when they stand at the edge of the ocean. There’s a way we can feel staring at a far-off mountain range capped in white or with open desert before us. There are places of deep forest that smell as green as the first day of creation and a few places on earth where, at night, you can still lay back and look up and know why they named it “The Milky Way.” And when a man says, “she’s beautiful” of his wife or mother, sister or daughter or simply a precious friend, he’s describing a rising in his heart that the phrase is wholly insufficient to capture. The real sensation is closest only to the kind of grateful awe felt at beholding something like the ocean or the infinity of space and the unnumbered stars that fill it.

So, as amazing as the sunrise was that morning, and as important as he knew it was to keep his eyes on the road in order to avoid killing them both, it physically hurt for Dan to look away from her.

Moments like that have a palpable frailty. They are like a thin-strand ice sculpture created by dripping water. You hold it with the lightest touch, fearing not simply your clumsiness, but even the warmth of your hands. You examine it, knowing that it is melting and growing ever more brittle and endangered, until — finally, unavoidably — some key part gives and the rest crumbles.

Eventually, she has to wake up. Eventually, they have to arrive. Eventually... eventually there is even death and all existence is fragile.

But this isn’t eventually.

This is now, and she is peaceful, and for a moment he is alone with something that, while not much more than the memories it stirs, is yet a little bit more.

Emily, by the way. Her name is — and always will be — Emily. And for the rest of Dan's life, he will never be able to hear that name without feeling the exquisite twist of the piece of her left embedded in his heart.