dream deep

“What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
–Jack Kerouac, On The Road.

Peaches and tea in the smack middle of the night sweetened with a spoonful of honey and thin green discs of biscuit and the last of the chocolate half-wrapped in gold foil. The table is quiet and the ice clinks in the glass and my cousin comes home from her midnight rendezvous with her salon-store beau, black-shirted and liner-eyed and short-skirted and quiet, unsure whether to open the door to the kitchen to say hello or to not. She goes in the opposite room, the Long Room, and my brothers’ voices quieten with the aging night.
A whole long day full of weeks and a week full of months that go by inevitably: this is how they go by: one, one, one, one, one. This afternoon was two loads of laundry front and back, clothes-pins like drops of dried sugar-plastic on thin little wires bent into triangles and donuts. One armful out the front and another out the back: the sun is in my eyes and soon it will start to rain. It didn’t, by the way. Deliberately on the single-couch with the salmon-colored bedsheet hung out for bugs and never returned, and deliberately on the little coffee-table, shellac peeling off on the undersides of my thighs and an oil-stain on my toe from the grease of the wooden stool out back. The act of folding laundry: I hate the white shirts, the button-down ones with the collars and the line across the shoulders: they take too much time to make up.

Cousin has left the Long Room and adjourned into the washroom, I hear the water of the tap and the rattle of the bottles of hair-product, one-by-one on the little white wire-rack she ranges them: shower and hair and hair and face and scrub and the gentle, transparent, odorless liquid in the green bottle that says FEMININE WASH: EUCALYPTUS. She will rattle and rage and comb out her long dark hair, thinking all the while of the boy who has just driven away. He’s fast and a little cocky, a little mindless: youth has authorized him so; but good enough nonetheless, we suppose.

Tomorrow to chapel and my lord Jesus on the cross and an hour of standing and sitting and wondering why the head of the family and I are still not speaking. 
Hello, Jesus. Hello, pigeons. Hello, SANCTUARY FOR YE WHO HAVE SINNED.

I must meet a mad person: someone who rushes around and around and does things and drives a mad vehicle and laughs the Greatest Laugh in the World. I simply must. It is destiny. We shall have a mad dream to drive across the continents together, a simply mad dream, full of gumballs and mad sex and midnight station-stops in the desert where cowboys roam and the stars tell you things with secret voices they don’t have in the cities. The silver tap twists: the warm water sluices: the soap falls down the drain.