“The Other Side of the Highway”

by Luke Buchanan

Till I die, I'll spend my days staring out at the other side of the highway. Eyes sinking deeper into the hot glimmer of asphalt, metallic blur as cars sweep by. Every new town I arrive in, I lie. When people ask me about myself, I always make up some reason for visiting:  family, business, reuniting with a long-distance girlfriend. I got so good, I eventually stopped planning ahead. The stories would just come falling out of my open mouth. There I am in one town—walking down the sidewalk of another hick neighborhood, the white paint hanging in strips from all the little houses. Half rabid dogs are losing their shit as I pass by, throwing themselves against rusted metal fences and choking on their own fibrous spit. Then I’m sitting alone in some dusty roadhouse. In the faltering glow of neon bar lights, elbows squished against the dusty glass covering, I’m pretending to get drunk, that I even can. I don't seek out company here, nor do I avoid it. If someone slips into the cracked leather stool beside me, I know I can lie to them as effortlessly as anyone else. I make up some childhood trauma, some white trash platitude spoken by a father or grandfather I never really had. Next thing I know, I’m slumped into the bench at yet another bus stop. I’m breathing in the cool air, or letting the heat seep into my bones, or taking shelter from the rain. I gaze out across the highway and remember. All those years, and years, and years back. The very first town, the first time I waited for a bus to carry me off. Then it comes shuddering to a halt, doors jerking open, exhaust pipe heaving. All buses have the same smell. Tough to describe, but everybody knows it. The faux leather seats, dusty rubber, speckled plastic paneling. I always scramble for a window seat. I like to rest my forehead against the glass. It leaves a pale, greasy smudge afterwards. I watch billboards make streaks in the air, and the abandoned husks of farms, tall grass rippling by. Up from Texas to Oklahoma, where empty fields and stalks of corn pull me into nauseous sleep. Further North into Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa. Sometimes my path veers south, ends up in one of the Carolinas or Tennessee, where the moon is made of seared wax. I  form a map of the continental United States behind closed eyelids. I mumble the names of highways like a pantheon of gods, interstate shields drifting through the static in my head. Sometimes, when I’m closer to sleep, I’ll count off the years since it happened.  The road, the procession of identical towns, the chemtrail striped sky—I know that they’ll someday pull me back— fleeing into the blazing afternoon heat, the one time I’ve tasted heaven.

 I looked deep inside of myself, and all I could find was America.