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turn by turn
October 29, 2007
Sometimes, the short, three-mile drive home, from where I walk back to by car at the end of every workday, becomes choked with an avalanche of traffic, cars full of people just as anxious to end that part of their days.
Sometimes, on those days, I see the clot of cars on South Lamar Boulevard, and I seize the opening to turn early, onto South First, Bouldin, Dawson. All three streets head south, but at some point, I need to turn west again to get home. I want to be home with an almost physical sense of urgency.
Most days, I get through the days, flipping through screen after screen of scanned documents, generated, maintained, collected, and scanned by people I have no connection to, for a case that I have no stake in, other than the long, tenuous, and anonymous connection that someone out there is my "client". So, on the rare day I don't coach and I don't run, I just want to be home, I just want the cool leather of the couch on my skin, and the television and digital recorder filling the emptiness with noise and life and characters that are there for me more readily and easily than most of the real ones in my life.
Until recently, when I finally studied maps of the area for a run, on those sometimes days when I would try to find my own path home, I would drive south, determined to find the westward passage south of Mary, south of Oltorf, and I would dive, armed only with suddenly faulty intuition, into a meandering maze of wooded South Austin neighborhoods. Turn after turn, I would only find myself on more quiet, empty streets. I know I'm surrounded by homes and lives, but they're all hidden from me, closed away, like parts of my own past, present and future are now.
Dead ends, changes of direction, streets that are familiar but detached from the versions of them I know. Lifetimes, possibilities, but just impossibilities, segregated by barricades and asphalt eaten up by weeds and growth.
When you're busy in the process of getting lost, sometimes there's this awareness of it, that despite your best efforts, the searching of your memories for guidance, trying to spot the setting sun on an overcast day for direction, peering at beheaded street signs to orient yourself, you're turning deeper and deeper into the labrynth, further from anything you might call home, anything you might call hope.
Sometimes, you're willing, even desperate, to ask for directions from a friendly face, or any face, but there aren't any. The occasional hostile, suspicious look. The door on Clawson Avenue that a friend no longer lives behind.
I've never felt lost by this many turns before. Never felt so far away from being someone worthwhile. Never felt this alone. Never felt the presence of such good friends to be so ultimately meaningless. They can't save me from this.
Sometimes, on most of those days, I get home, finally, I feed my cat, I find something to eat, and hours later, at 1:30am, struggling to stay awake to avoid surrendering another day, I wonder if this home, in this life, is any better than being lost.
Posted by Rob at October 29, 2007 10:05 PM