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| creative commons |
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.
