A Moment

night zero

I tend to wander. It doesn’t make me lost; it just helps me find things I didn’t know I was looking for.

I’ve been wandering my whole life, claiming enough digits in zip codes and license plates to win the lottery. I’ve lived in Pennsylvania and Georgia and California and Wisconsin and North Carolina andbackto California multiple times.

People ask me, “Where are you from?” and I never know how to respond. “Where’s home for you?” the question goes, and the answer hangs in the air like an unresolved note.

I’ve called plenty of placeshomeand yet nowhere at all.

Tonight, I’m wandering again. Wandering like the last twenty-seven years but different this time, caught behind the wheel of my Mitsubishi Galant—Mitsy, her name, born 2002, white like a pearl. Steinbeck traveled with a poodle in a truck-camper, and others have wandered by Volkswagen bus and bare feet.

I have Mitsy. My first car, my most consistent companion of the last decade.

We’re blazing through the desert black, Mitsy and I, thrust into a nightlong race with the sun to the Grand Canyon, the first in an ambitious string of stops to come. A quest for home.

But I don’t want to skip too far ahead of myself. Home is for later; the road is now.

I’ve a flare for the dramatic, you see, athingfor creating moments. Perhaps it’s the storyteller or romantic in me or that I am learning more what it means to be alive. Seven years ago, I first hit the road with my younger brother and sister, driving us from Georgia to Pennsylvania via the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We ascended the country’s tallest lighthouse on Cape Hatteras and transported Mitsy by car ferry and discovered wild ponies on Ocracoke Island, and I fell in love with the journey, themoment,moment after moment, though my siblings often fixated more on the clock and these extra hours being “wasted.” Never mind that we almost ran out of gas because I was young and naïve and still new to this wholedrivingthing. I’m less of a novice now, having driven back and forth across America these last few years in search of purpose and belonging, working at camps and living with friends on coastlines opposite everything I’d ever known.

Something about the road keeps reaching for me, feels born in my bones. Years ago, my father tells me, I cried and cried as an infant and could only be consoled by nightly drives. He’d seat me into his Oldsmobile and drive me around the block a few times, and I’d get lulled to sleep by thehumof an engine and kinetic energy propelling us forward. Even as a baby the road comforted me.

Like a bottle, the road comforts still.

I lean forward in the driver’s seat and yawn and blink, following the yellow lines and white dashes, the road reflectors gleaming like stars below. I look up and follow the stars above, too. You forget they exist in Los Angeles, the stars, smothered by smog and madness, and they’re gorgeous out here, unfettered and vast like sand sprinkled on a coal canvas. He’s out there somewhere, the sun—the great star—busy tending with Mongolia or the Middle East at the moment. I hope to beat him