Access Road

creative commons

Access Road

by Alison Luterman

 

I don’t know if other people feel like there’s a life

running alongside their so-called real life like an

access road runs alongside the main highway.

It’s funkier, lonelier; you didn’t expect to find yourself on

this one-

lane frontage path, you kept thinking you’d get on the

freeway any minute now, where you fondly imagined

yourself

doing eighty, ninety, hurtling down the untrammeled

autobahn of

free will. That was the life you thought would be yours

when you

were young and everything seemed laid out as at a picnic

with red

gingham tablecloths. Only it was never like that, not

really, you had

just been raised with too many stories, always stories,

not the real,

ancient ones with burning bushes and three-headed

 dogs, but the

whitewashed, idealized, candy-coated pap fed to children

in mid-

twentieth-century suburbs. And so in your fantasies you

neglected

to factor in the reality of ants crawling up your legs at the

actual

picnic, the way they tickle and sting, or the spilled juice

and

crumbled potato chips and your beautiful mother young

again, and

strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy

beauty

because she, too, was always calibrating how reality

didn’t measure

up to the story. So you’ve inherited her dilemma, what

 else is new,

and evening is drawing nigh, and you are still on that

access road, which as it turns out is going to the same

place

the main road was headed all along.