Driving I-15

147 Driving I-15 Jill Talbot Ido not want to take back any of the streets I have lost. I do not want to reclaim any cities. I lost Washington Avenue to Hal. A whole town to Shaw. The blue house on Stover Street to Kenny, though maybe I still have the way the morning sun warmed the kitchen. I surrendered Tech Terrace Park to Jason, along with a bar on Nineteenth Street. Brian owns the second story of that stained-glass-windowed restaurant where we shared a salad and too much wine the night before I left town, the night I drove away in my black Jeep, my hand tossed up in a final thank you at the corner of University. For years, I let Mike have the Vegas Strip, though enough years and enough visits back have now rendered it a long avenue of magic, for when my three-year-old sticks her head out the back window in wonder on a desert night, I need no part of what I should have let go of long ago. I have always let men have cities, streets, and I shouldn’t have because they abandoned them long before I did, leaving me to drive through a conversation we once had across from campus, past the porch where we once read Raymond Carver to one another, by an apartment where I used to spend the night, shower. It’s been five years, and I’m still not going back to Lubbock, Texas, because I know I’d be going back to Friday afternoons in the Sheraton, a balcony on Fourteenth Street, and a running trail, and I’d worry that Room 236 or the white wooden railing or mile two will not remember me, as if I were never really there, just the shadow that once followed someone she loved. I tried going back to a house across from the Eagle River once, but the shudders of a summer strengthened more than my resolve to say goodbye to it, and I turned my car around before I could even see the street where I once waited for him to come home, when he was still coming home. Yesterday, I drove the hour and a half to see you. Turned off my cell phone and the Allman Brothers CD and told you stories. There never seems to be enough time to tell you all of me, and I want you to 148 Ecotone: reimagining place hear: the first time I watched my dad lose a football game, the night I looked downstairs to find my brother open a bottle of wine hours after everyone else had stopped drinking, the way my mother pronounced “I love you” as she left her mother sitting in a yellow chair because she had never given herself permission to walk away without the words, the night Kenny drove twenty-six hours straight because when he called, he heard too long alone, too long drinking in my voice. I kept the cruise at eighty-two and made the winding curves north, talking to a road. Talking to you. I told you of all the streets and towns and corners I surrendered so that you would know I am coming to you without a country. I am drawing you a map of me and of that stretch of highway you’ve never seen so that it will never be yours, never mine, but ours. ...