Driving through the night, the freeway was lined with the darkness of trees accented by the golden speckles of bedroom windows alive. You slept softly in the passenger seat while the radio hummed a folky, humbling tune. I grew jealous of what you dreamt as the hours turned into hundreds of miles, and the suburbs dissolved into country acres.
As we sped, I thought of all the homes we were passing, all the families we flew by. Over bridges and through tunnels, I pictured happy families and sad families, I imagined the drunken dads and pill-popping moms. I thought of daughters discovering their pubescent bodies in mirrors, and boys lifting weights in basements. I imagined children praying at their bedsides, I imagined parents kissing foreheads and reading bedtime stories. In my mind, we were driving passed both strong and broken households, we were driving passed everything important and detrimental, we were speeding passed childhoods and mid-life crises and arguments and the love garnered in family homes. How many families had I thoughtlessly driven passed as we crossed state lines?
You stirred in your sleep and offered to drive. At the next rest stop, I stretched my legs and sat on a bench while you used the bathroom. I stared off into the stretch beyond the highway, wondering about all the things lost in black of the night. In the distance, someone flicked off a lamp in a bedroom window, a window that I’d confused for a star on the horizon.
