Headlights + Lightyears

Leaves like silver dollars but dull on one side. Flickering like the wind chime teasing a tune. Leaves like a coins their shaded undersides not quite ready to welcome the season’s change. The tree across the street takes the breeze with an inhale, shaking all the leaves like flipping coins allowing glimpses of their shaded side. Shadows or more light.

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Laying on the living room couch awake too late, all night the headlights trace zebra stripes across the walls. Constant sense of going. No one stopped here. Very aware that there are other places. Dynamic of my mom afraid to go anywhere and house being on this transient road next to a freeway. The light always traced the same pattern so you could tell when my dad came home because the pattern of someone pulling into the driveway was slightly different, a brighter stripe would fill the living room. The exit ramp from the freeway has changed since I’ve laid in the living room. Those lights are less common. Just cars bolting down the road. Their headlights still trace through the living room, over the pictures in the dinning room.

When I lay in my living room now, on a quiet street, those patterns rarely visit me. When they appear across the ceiling the light is startling. Unexpected in this place I’ve found is home. From a place I worked hard to get away from, traveling 3000 miles to run along the walls of a place I very much never want to leave. The first thought I have is who is coming home? my instincts on high alert. Then they pass down the road and I wonder who could leave or did they just not know.

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We can measure everything in lightyears if we wished. Time would be very small, decimals so comparatively small we would not equate seconds to minutes to years to lifetimes. Time would be so minuscule that what we know now could fit into a pill capsule, into a packet that gets thrown into the bottom of the wash misremembered, lost to wherever what doesn’t come out of the spin cycle ends up.