Map-ish

So as you can probably tell, the word was "map." I had no ideas. None. Hence the drabble.

Picture taken with a crumpled map and a penny. I had an image in my head of how I wanted it to look and it didn't actually happen that way. Not sure if I like this one or not.

    

        The map is a web of confusing lines, crisscrossing at random places. The key at the bottom is supposed to help untangle them, is supposed to make the lines make sense. But the fact is, they don’t, that the blue line and the red are different only in color. That she’s already lost, and she hasn’t even entered the world yet. That she can’t tell where Interstate 5 ends and where the other roads begin.

        Perhaps that is just because I-5 keeps going. It weaves through San Diego and Los Angeles, Sacramento and Portland, Salem and Tacoma and Olympia and many other places besides. It travels, stretching out from one tip of the country to another, running like a stream, one that forges its own path. That goes where it wants as though it has a mind of its own.

        She has never been to any of the places I-5 passes. She just sits on the edge, watching the cars rush past, (on to Salem and Olympia and Seattle  or wherever they happen to be going,) driving for hours or minutes, she doesn’t know. She can’t go with them. She wants to.  

        (Or does she? She doesn’t know anything about these places, or the people in the cars. She just catches flashes. A mother leans over from the shotgun seat. A teenage girl changes the radio station. A man and woman sit next to each other, facing straight ahead. And then they are gone, for they are travelling at sixty miles an hour and she, she is just sitting.)

        She imagines sitting in one of those cars, being a person with places to be and things to do—but of course she has that as well. Her place is here, and she doesn’t want to think about all the things she has to do. It is for that reason that she sits near the highway, listening to the roar of the cars as they drown out everything else.

        (A man reaches up to change his turn signal, a woman with a ponytail nods along to some unheard beat, someone in the passenger seat is gesturing emphatically.)

        The wind slips past her, rustling her clothes, her hair. But the cars keep moving, moving into the wind. Parting it like Moses parted the Red Sea, as though it doesn’t exist, because they—the Free ones—they are above it all.  

     

   She turns back to her map. It takes her many minutes to find I-5 again, but once she does, she traces the line. Or what she thinks is the line.

        (And the music flashes out to greet her, a bass, lingering just for a second before the driver vanishes. Come and gone before she realizes that it was there at all, and she looks up, looks for the car, but it could be anywhere now.)  

       And the blue line is weaving down the west coast. And the driver of the car could spread his music out all over the country if he so wished.

  

      She wonders how many other people would hear it.

  

      And the wind blows again, stronger, rustling the pages of map. She holds it tighter, ignoring the cold, ignoring the voice calling for her—

        She just stares at the map and the road and imagines being free.