Inktober Twenty-Third. “Muddy.”

I have slipped this note into your pocket. You may not remember me. . .

I found, at Donna’s cocktail and pumpkin carving party, that it was difficult to remember home. I could remember the small things: the way the morning staff at the McDonald’s by the interstate took at least twenty full minutes making a fresh cup. Or the way strangers broken-down on the highway’s shoulder were a friend to anyone who could spend the time to help.

The placement of town on a map was ill-defined in my mind. Surveying guides and electronic route finders, the roads in that area all seem to criss-cross and snake over themselves but always land in different bergs or townships with no mention of the place, just the green values of trees. There no airline tickets sold in or out of Whistle Wood, no train tracks that run along through my vague memory of that small cluster of houses. And as you might expect the website links are all ‘Error Pages’. Facebook is useless if you can’t remember the names of faces. Each fading like sparks snapping off from the end of sparklers and lost in the dark.

But I remember you in the dark.

Do you remember the blackout, while you and I were both at Felix Whitt’s party? The way everyone poured out into the street to see if the world had ended and some of us rushed out into the dark because we hoped it had? I really can’t be sure it’s you. But I think you and Edna and Luisa and I slid into the back of Felix’s Datsun and we drove looking at all the houses with the lights off and parents standing or arguing in lawns — looking so different and ugly in Felix’s headlights. Sweating in the summer heat and their pathetic looking clothes. And later, the Caruthers’ horses that had gotten loose, all of them streaming out over that shitty wire fence and just spilling into the interstate with us — around our car, breath steaming the glass of your window.

Is it okay that I’ve forgotten what it felt like to just drive on those long stripes of highways forever? And that I can’t remember when or if I ever stopped driving?

If you can’t remember me or Whistle Wood then will you at least please return this letter to me safely? -FM