road trip day 5

Everything breaks down. Seams strain and burst. Good moods turn to bad. It is impossible to share a vehicle with someone for innumerable hours without finding things about them which irritate you.

Then there’s real imperfect life colliding with perfectly laid plans. You make a pattern of sleeping at only Days Inns until the night you can’t find one, and a pattern that shouldn’t mean anything breaks apart, and it hurts you, even though you know it shouldn’t.

And someone decides to kill himself and leave two young sons and their mom, as well as his own mom, behind. And you don’t know what to say when your son asks you why, because the truth is that no one understands it. We can all look at it from the outside and see he made the wrong choice. And no one can say why he couldn’t see that, and stop it from happening.

And even though it’s selfish, you’re exhausted and worn down by the fact that what should have been a week or more of easy driving punctuated by precisely selected destinations for optimal fun has instead been compressed into two nonstop days of driving home. To arrive in time for the funeral.

And you know the inconvenience of a long drive is nothing in comparison to the endless hurt one hopeless man has caused his entire family. But it still makes you weary, and pained, and irritable. The best you can do is write about it in the hopes that you can then let it go. Away. Into ether. Where bad moods need to be cast while in the close proximity of your family who has, in fact, done nothing wrong.