Road

You know this and almost no one else knows this: but an almond croissant is just a twice baked one, a day old one, at most places anyway, and it’s magic how a sad, stale croissant transforms into a new treat with a delightful cookie-like crust. The barista making your coffee warns you beforehand, so as not to disappoint, that the almond croissant here is not just almond but also has a swipe of orange marmalade and not just almond paste and would you still want that, you said, resoundingly, 1000% more intrigued, yes, and ripping into the bag outside, layers upon layers of pastry shattering like glass, you don’t know how you’ve lived all the other almond croissants before, including the one you had on the way here, all the ones without orange marmalade, the tender orange peel slivers tinging the almond’s creamy frangipane with spice.

*

As a child you remember how going home was always quicker than the ride there, yet you would fall asleep on the way back, not unlike how you peer into the rearview most days now and the way your son will nod off in the car seat, safe and cocooned, head tilted to the right, thumb affixed to the mouth until he is tired enough to let go, let mouth go agape.

*

You breathe the salt-infused air one last time before you go, inhaling so deep you grit sand between your teeth, the damp coastal sand pulling the rocks, the cerulean blue waters swirling between the cliffs, the intermittent kelp’s tangle in the arms of the coral. Soon the winding and wending redwoods find you, the shadows of the towering redwoods swallow you, bouncing off your silver car through slivers of light that on the next curve recede back into shadow, with each and every turn. In the passenger seat sits the wrinkled brown pastry bag, housing the half-eaten croissant, butter leaving an impression on the parchment the way the orange peel and almond smear your palate, and you nibble bites once you stop, crumbs shedding across the front seat.

* 

Perhaps there are no stories, just slips of paper and moments: your son planted on a step stool at a train museum, an hour east of Los Angeles, but what is time and distance in that traffic, running a model train back and forth over a foot of train track, back and forth, humming train sounds, back and forth, focus zoomed onto a miniature engine, repeat, repeat.

*

Out of the car, the first time since the coast, you are struck by the absence of ocean and waves crashing, instead the chorus of the trees. You cannot tell whether it is a lake or blue sky, if by absence of water it is sky by absence of sky it is water, a drought of elements, by the patterns the tree tufts crimp along the skyline, your eyes trace the map. Here there is nothing of the tendrils of time, the perils of expectation: your grandmother’s decline, of not doing or being enough or of being a good enough mother or person, of not reading enough or writing enough or sending work out enough, of writing in a defined genre, of not of the of not’s. 

*

At home months later, you peer at your son in the rearview, and, awake, he parrots what he knows of your grandmother. She’s sick. Drink soup. Feel better. You turn towards him, his head full of hope and trains, at an age where boxes over heads and laundry baskets over backs become dinosaurs. You say, sometimes people get sick. And, you hesitate to say it, sometimes, they don’t get better. His mouth, agape, whenever you catch him in thought, absorbing and processing, you name it, he is thinking.

*

You know a croissant isn’t enough to sustain you, and you are less than an hour to home when you stop for laksa and a blast of commercial air conditioning on the interstate enroute to another interstate. The heat of a spicy red seafood broth, the chewy bouncy rice noodles, meaty quail eggs, and three whole headed prawns restores you, as you bite the heads off, slurping the insides where all the flavor is, long tines of their antennae escaping your mouth like wandering whiskers but what do you sense, and when you finally arrive at home you discover later, much later, a truth: shrimp hold their hearts in their heads. Like your son, you are thinking; in your writing, thinking, always thinking, enroute to gradually detaching and divorcing from meaning, syntax, linearity, narrative. Meaning and emotion and head and hearts on sleeves and story. You won’t tell the reader what this means or doesn’t, because you don’t entirely know, not yet. Instead, you savor the moment.