earthbelow

The Top Ten Things I Learned While Driving Up the Eastern Seaboard in A 4-Door Car

1. Never underestimate the importance of having a good playlist to drive by.

2. Those blue signs with gas, food, and hotel pictures in little boxes are very useful. Pay attention to them.

3. You can judge a state by the bathrooms in it's visitor's centers. Because South Carolina had a wonderful visitor's center and is, in fact, a rockin' state. New Jersey looked like a disaster area with lots of refuges and small, dirty children without shoes.

4. The people who work at visitor's centers are very helpful and you should take advantage of their vast knowledge of their state. And ya know, free maps. And bathrooms. Visitor's centers are a little piece of genius.

5. Pointing towards where you want the driver to turn and saying the opposite thing is an easy way to cause a multi-car pileup on the interstate.

6. Nothing will get you more than the 4 P's - Piss Poor Prior Planning.

7. Go to the bathroom at the rest stop/visitor's center/gas station even if you don't think you need to. Because South Carolina is a very big state on a full bladder.

8. Cruise control is your friend.

9. Exits with letters are not all the same thing. 14C will take you to a much different place than 14B.

10. The New Jersey Turnpike is a little piece of hell on Earth. It is made of suck. I am sure many solid marriages have been broken up on the New Jersey Turnpike. If you can survive two hours in Jersey, you can survive anything.

( What I Did On My Very Last Summer Vacation - A Pictorial Journey By Car )

So, a big chunk of my life is in boxes. Which serves to tell me, in no uncertain terms:

Yes, your life really is falling apart in stages like a rocket launching into orbit.

All big moments and holding your breath and being afraid of shaking apart if you really think about what you're doing and hoping nothing blows up before you get there and being worried that when you do get there, you're going to run out of air and die suffocating a million miles from home.

In literal terms, I know I only have three days left 'til I walk, but it feels like I have three more years to get through - because there's so damn much to do and all these people want a piece of me before I go, all these people who have some last minute agenda for me.

And on top of it, I still have two exams and a paper. None of which I actually know how to do. But that's par for the course for every semester of my life since high school.

But really, I just want to pack and enjoy my last few days on Earth in Florida.

I'm memorizing the visceral details of things, packing them up in my mind. In boxes that I'll take out when I want to remember things.

Like the way the grass greens up after a rainstorm and the way my dogs' ears have the softest fuzz and what the weight of a dog's body feels like on top of the blanket by your feet and how much I like the sandwiches they have at this one place on campus and how nice it is to walk around on campus in the spring before it gets hot and everything is windy and the beautiful darkness of the sky when it's about to rain. The way my mom and I always go to movies on Saturdays and it's our ritual and you can't open the cheese to the nachoes until the movie starts.

This *really* is happening. If I sound a little sad and a whole lot freaked, I am. I feel frazzled and my body has been physically sore for three days now. I am so, so tired. Part of me would give anything to stay. Part of me just wants to get it over with and be there already.

And part of me is sitting in boxes, wondering if it'll still be intact when I get up to New York. Because there's a lot of bumps and jolts and a hundred little lasts to get over before I'm done.

Last movie, last time you see your school, last time you see people, last time you go somewhere, last time you touch someone, last time you sleep in your bed, last time you can call it home.