In the last two days, I got to experience two Great Lakes (Lake Erie, Lake Michigan) and two cities (Iowa City, Omaha). Today, the road takes us to the Badlands National Park. We are halfway into a seven hour drive.
I’m not generally a crystal girl, but I have brought two crystals with me on this trip. The first is a volcanic rock known as Que Sera that I was gifted by an acquaintance ahead of my first trip moving across the country in 2014. It’s a gray stone, almost plain looking but for the speckled blue and pink bits. I kept it in on me the entire time back then, as I am doing right now. It’s grounding, that kind of continuity amid so much change. It kind of feels like middle name, the only name I kept when I changed my first and last.
The second crystal I have acquired much more recently. It is a rock known as desert rose selenite. I bought it for someone, but the moment was never right to give it to them. It still feels like it doesn’t belong to me, and might still find its away to a new home at some point. The placard at the store told me the desert rose brings clarity. I liked its heft.
After we pitched our tent atop a ridge overlooking the expanse of the water, I showed both crystals to Mad. We were basking in a long sunset on the beach of Lake Erie. She told me there is a third crystal in my future, a rock she wants to give me after the road trip. Then, sheepishly, she shares that she carries crystals inside herself before gifting them. I paused, WHAT. We both laugh. It’s a way of imbuing a piece of myself into the rock, the quickest way of doing so, the only internal organ that’s easily accessible, she explains. Well there’s also the mouth and the anus, we contemplate, but the former doesn’t quite carry the same significance and the latter requires a lot more logistics and preparation.
The vagina is a self-cleaning mechanism, after all. As someone with a precarious relationship to the feminine, I ask her how she squares doing something like that with what, to me, seems like a really old-school (maybe even terf-y) conception of womanhood. It feels witchy, she says, and it feels like a shortcut into herself.
I keep thinking about this. Shortcuts into ourselves. Literally, physically inside of our bodies. I thought about bones and teeth and people who save their organs after a surgery, maybe an appendix or tonsils. Bone requires death, teeth are mostly unavailable to us after childhood, organs too squishy. Then I remember a photo I saw on Reddit of a man holding a gallstone that had been removed from his gallbladder.
I imagine the intimacy of gifting—or receiving—a gallstone. Your own body makes it over the course of months, maybe years. It’s gross and beautiful. I run this idea by Mad and we decide to remember it in our old age if we come into gallstones. “Oh god, that would be so powerful,” she laughs.
I dated this girl for a few months. One day we were at the beach, it was already cool outside and there were only a few other people within eyesight. We were both—very explicitly—trying to figure out if we could build the kind of life we wanted individually, with each other. One of our incompatibilities, she explained, is that we operate on different levels. You’re here, she gestured toward the sand, and I’m here, she gestured about a foot above the sand. Tell me more, I pulled the thread. Well you are an organizer, you think about people and society, relationships and power. Meanwhile I’m trying to experience life, drink up the conversations and the people around me, arrive at some sort of Truth. She looks out at the water. I want to experience Ocean.
Was she telling me I lack depth? Fuck that, I thought. Truth doesn’t exist. And I want to experience ocean, too. The relationship ended not too long after that conversation, but I think about it when I’m near big bodies of water. Am I experiencing this moment right? Is there something I’m not getting?
We’ve been playing a car game during our drive in which we offer up themes and then each have to choose a song to match the prompt. Pick a song that symbolizes your coming of age moment, pick a song that got you through a break up, pick a song that makes you want to move your body. Pick the song you put on when you want to impress somebody
We get to know each other through our choices, the songs we both know the lyrics to, the songs we think are staples of our youth that the other hasn’t ever heard.
We stopped at a thrift store called I Want That. It was a tight, tiny space, mostly used electronics and toys and Halloween decorations which we’ve been seeing everywhere. There was a record section, an absolute goldmine to any city-dwelling audiophile. We each left with sixty dollars worth of records, feeling like we robbed the place. Dolly Parton and Bruce Springsteen and Prince and Lauretta Lynn and Garth Brooks and Marty Robbins, the latter two of which I was unfamiliar with but nodded along in excitement with Mad.
In my moving pod, sitting on a truck somewhere, maybe even driving parallel to us, my stuff on its way to the same place I am on my way to, there is a box I marked FRAGILE. It’s a record player I bought as a teenager at the pawn shop in my town. It had been living at my mother’s house all these years because I never had space for it in my slew of small New York City apartments. But now that I am tripling my square footage, I finally took the last of my personal belongings out of her house. Maybe I’ll become a vinyl guy, I think, tempted by the allure of constant self-creation, as if it will solve my problems. As if my very being is just the accumulation of interests and hobbies, decisions and follow-through
I’ve been learning a lot about rural life and trucks in the many hours of conversations on this trip. Mad has spent significant time in rural Utah and in Montana. She has been striking up conversations with anyone above sixty that we encounter. A fisherman at a pond. A West Virginian man at a thrift store. A guy coming out of a red truck in a parking lot. It’s a Dodge Ram 3500, she tells me. “Cool truck, sir,” she gestures at him with a thumbs up. She tells me about the politics of which car you drive when you live in a small town, which of the more than one hundred options of license plates to pick (always the god ones if you’re an organizer trying to relate to the people around you, and god forbid do not pull up to their house in an electric vehicle).
I read this last paragraph out loud to her and she tells me, “I feel like an old man sometimes, but hearing it back, it’s like hearing one of my favorite parts about myself noticed.”
We’ve been doing a lot of noticing these last few days, just over 1,650 miles down. I don’t think there’s a wrong way to notice.
Dizzy
"Maybe I’ll become a vinyl guy, I think, tempted by the allure of constant self-creation, as if it will solve my problems."
there is so much in this one sentence!! gorgeous as always <3
This journey would make an amazing mini series or documentary. I'm excited for all that you'll discover along the way.
And yeah, don't pull up in any kind of electric vehicle or (god forbid) a Prius. Yeesh.