"Closure"

Posted on March 16, 2008

I saw Sami in her pickup truck on the 10 East headed toward downtown. She was parked just to the left of me, midday backup at full thrall. LA is a city of small traffic windows, roadways successively open and closing like castle doors on a miniature golf hole. Just five minutes earlier, I would have watched as she hurriedly sped off of my flank, her little Dodge racing as swiftly away as she disappeared out of my life. Maybe I would have gasped, then shivered, shocked at the sight of her after almost a year, but it all would have been just one instant on the interstate, no intimacy of words or discomfort of shared space. There she would go, just as before, briefly by my side and then nowhere to be found, and in true LA fashion, it all would happen while hardly happening at all.

But that’s not how it went. An eight car pile up, so demolition derby-like it was aired that evening on the six o’clock news, reduced the moving lanes to one, and then none, as emergency personnel attended to the injured and crews arrived to clear glass and fenders to the side of the road. I don’t know how long we were sitting there—I guess it was a minute or two—before I absently looked over and saw her in the next lane, dictating into her tape recorder. It was a habit she’d described to me the first time we met; a way to call herself on hubris, though it hadn’t worked for her so far.

My first thought was how difficult it is to hide in the front seat of a car. I raised my arm against the door, leaned my head into my hand, tried to make myself so small that I’d become invisible. But there’s something about hiding which implies a latent surrender or guilt; and the truth was I’d done nothing wrong. Staring at the radio, my mind slipped back almost a year to when Sami made me feel like the smallest man on earth. For months, I struggled with those feelings. First abandonment, then insignificance. The idea that a person could be held to so tightly and then so carelessly let go.

The thought of it blew a fresh wound into me, and I realized what I had to do.

I took a breath, my heart galloping like a racehorse, my hands getting that subtropical feeling. Then I made sure the cars in front weren’t moving, opened the door and set foot into nowhere.

~

I think what bothers me most about traffic isn’t the feeling of crawling along, but the notion that life itself has broken down. As long as I’m moving, there isn’t time to assess the quality of my destination. It’s only when the cars slow, miles of brake lights stretched before me like demon’s eyes wantonly blinking, that I begin to ask myself, “What am I doing? Is this any way to spend an afternoon?” But the truth is, I’m thinking something else, though I try not going to that place, that corner of the mind which conceals all of the gritty things we know but would rather not know about ourselves. I fight it, but the picture sharpens so quickly. Here I am, alone, unfulfilled, a young man hopelessly bound within a snaking line of rubber and metal, wondering if this is any way to spend the prime years of his life.

~

The odd part about standing on the Santa Monica Freeway is how big the lane lines look. Just one takes up the length of me. This provides a sort of roadside context for our importance in the world. Sami’s truck had looked close staring out the car window, but outside it seems much further away. There’s enough time between here and there to question the wisdom of what I’m doing. I take one step and then another, the heat squeezing me from high and low, my nostrils filled with the sharp smell of gasoline from the whir of ten thousand engines fiercely idling in captivity. When I knock on the window, Sami jumps. Not surprisingly.

What must go through someone’s head when approached by someone on foot on the freeway? Did she think I’d done this by design? That I’d spent the past year wandering traffic jams, just waiting for this moment? Her head tilted back and her eyes grew large until she caught up with the backdrop around me. She noticed my car parked one lane over, and while she looked less than thrilled, she pressed a button and the passenger window slid straight down.

“Jesus Christ, Wes.”

“What am I supposed to do? We’re just sitting here.”

“You could have kept sitting.”

“Yeah, maybe. But damn. Why didn’t you return my calls? We had a year of history and then you just ditch? How could you be so ice cold? I mean… why would you want to hurt me?”

She sighed and I knew that she wanted to escape, but the traffic was taking my side. “Wes,” she said wearily, “Not everyone grows up with picket fences. What do you want me to say? That I’m sorry? That I want things like they were? I don’t. You were there when I was going through some difficult times but the truth is I got over them and maybe I don’t want any reminders. Is it fair? Who knows? Maybe you should just get over it.”

The window went up, hard and tight. It’s odd how I felt like I was on the right side of it. I felt light as a hubcap running back to my car. I got inside and closed the door. My face regained its normal color. My breathing slowed. And a minute later, we started to move again.

By Dann Halem 2007

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