blue

Last night I dreamt I was a blurred headlight in America. I dreamt I flew through deserts and roadside diners. At a gas station (a gas station!) we stopped and I joked with the boney middle-aged woman with the hair of an eighteen year old and a name badge that said DIANNE. She was nice enough.

We were in a Chevvie or a Cadillac obviously. It was open-top.

'Lemme see!' one of the girls in the back seat kept yelling. She was grabbing at the road map in my compatriot's hands. One hand surrendered it to her while the other lolled on the cream wheel ashing it grey with a run-down cigarette. The night was a black space for the lines of street lamps and $99 store signs to expand across and behind you. Over in the back the girls drank rum. Of course rum.

By the time we got to the bridge it was nearly morning. The distant black was beginning to show dark teeth that bit the whiteness of the entering dawn. In the stillness and silence of the air you could hear a dream snap in two, a heart break. As the tyres of the car trod the dense asphalt of the bridge, I realised I was running instead of sitting. I was running across the bridge towards the dawn, horizon in the city. Then there was no car. No girls. I was alone in the white light where the dream left me.