I’m in a breakfast house. It was built in 1928 as a family home and converted 60 years later. The rooms are cozy, loaded with tables of people having breakfast and moving on into their daily lives. The people beside me are older—60’s perhaps. There are two couples with the women on one side and the men on the other. The men are dressed similarly, though the women display their particular flare. The women are talking about their lives in the fashion of people explaining how to better fold a blanket. Each woman has her own angle on how to approach their very similar lives. The woman on the left has decided to go to the baby shower, but decided to go with the target gift card as opposed to the hand-picked gift the other lady is prepared to buy.
I’m not sure whose husband is who.
On the surface they should be the ones directly across, but the conversations flow diagonally as much as parallel. The men are not retired. They’ll talking about business trips and the wives are considering whether they’ll travel on their own. This is a polite life. This is a life that I always equate with being American. It isn’t a life that belongs to me or ever could. I’m not that kind of American.
This kind of American man listens to his wife explain how and when he is supposed to interact with his grandkids. This is the life where the largest problem is deciding how long you want to be in a place to help a relative out, or how long to visit the cabin. My life is cut from expectations and hollowed out interactions. I live in the scissored ridges where people have moments of real conversation and the largest problems are about paying the mortgage and deciding what a life ought to look like.
Nothing in my life is resolved save for who I love, and where I will work for the next ten to fifteen years. I am happy in my own way. I find that happiness in those moments of closeness and conversation and I wear it like a cloak against the rest. I refuse to fall into the rhythm of a procedural where life is about connecting the dots in a picture that is already drawn for me.
I want to know that any day I can shut all that out, get in a car, and find solitude with my love and the road.