3.

I was up at 9 a.m. the next morning to make sure I didn’t miss them. I walked to Chris’s room and knocked. No answer. I tried another then another. They were all gone.

I smoked a cigarette on the balcony and rubbed the lump on my head. My time as a roadie had been short. Onto the next town and gig they went without me. Another direction my life could’ve veered off in. Maybe those other directions always seemed more appealing because they weren’t where I’d ended up. Maybe Monica showed it to a different guy in each city. Maybe she’d seen all fifty states and now wanted it seen in all fifty. I floated on my back in the pool and contemplated these things.

The next day I got back on the road. On the outskirts of Bowling Green, Kentucky, I hunched over a bar and scribbled numbers onto a napkin. Money had become an abrupt and real concern. I was spending too much of it, and not getting far enough. Although they’d seemed innumerable to me, the miles I’d covered were only a small dent in the hugeness of America. Where the letters would send me next remained a mystery, too. For a brief moment, I considered reading them to their end right then at that bar, but something inside prevented me.

I decided if I covered more ground in a day, I could spend less on accommodation. More time on highways meant I could save on gas. I decided luxuries like star ratings on accommodation or having more than one meal a day could go. I called my bank; the remaining amount for the house still hadn’t been received. I just needed to watch my money until that came through, then I’d be set.

Going back to Melbourne and its routine, only to attempt mustering what had gotten me to America in the first place again wasn’t an option. I was living in some part of my mind devoid of order and reason, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way back to it a second time.

I tracked south-west along country roads into the evening under a southern sky. I passed a cornfield, a dirt road disappearing into it. A few miles further, the fuel light came on. I found a small gas station and filled the tank to the brim, bought a chicken sandwich and a forty-ounce bottle of beer, and headed back the way I’d come.

After a few wrong turns, I found that same dirt road and turned onto it. The road ran deeper and deeper into the fields before rising into a crest to clear an irrigation pipe. I stopped there, moved my bag into the driver’s seat and myself into the passenger’s. There wasn’t much room to recline, but I took it as far as it’d go. The roof’s latches clicked open and I dropped the top to feel the breeze wash over my warm, dirty skin as I looked up. The player swallowed one of the CDs I’d bought in Cleveland, rolling onto track one as I ate my sandwich and sipped. My head sat just above the crops and I felt as though I was suspended in them as they swayed, shimmering like a deep green ocean in all directions.

There was something about the air that night. Warm and cool all at once, oppressively thick and impossibly thin, an energy coursing throughout. For a moment, I felt as though it might have floated me from my seat, cradling me in its arms like a mother with her child, and taken me into the night. I breathed in, letting it rest in my lungs – full and proud. Drawn into my blood and pumped to every dark corner of my body. Then I released, letting it take with it another scrap of my hurting each time.

Something brutal and unforgiving in me melted away, and for the first time since her passing, I cried for my mother, unapologetically and unabashed. The tears came in surges, running down my face and past the edges of my mouth. The sun slipped behind the horizon, as it had so many times before. Stars showed themselves, dotting and filling the night. They weren’t always seen, but they were always there. The sky changed above me as I changed below it.