Dim Yellow Lights Splashed Along the Pavement

In the still heat of the night, I stuck my arm out the window, feeling the hot breeze like a hair dryer. Hands off the wheel, I pressed harder on the gas pedal, flying down an empty boulevard drenched in dim yellow lights splashed along the pavement. Endless stories surrounded me on all sides—those memories of specific moments over the last three decades, all fading with time like raw denim that had been left outside to dry for a little too long. I was taking the long way home. There are few nights in the year in which I wear short sleeves, and the feeling of liberation is immeasurable. Those few nights in which I’m not hunched over and hiding under a black cardigan—generally the one with the top button missing, and a small, totally repairable hole along the seam in the left shoulder that I’ve nonetheless never quite managed to repair. It’s more of a security blanket than anything else. I drove down Sunset, winding back and forth and remembering moments at 16 years old when the boundaries of my newly expanded world barely exceeded going to an all night diner, and not a particularly good one at that.

That night, I had seen people from my past as I smiled, internally imagining a small “fuck you” to the minor traumas that had one seemed significant—no, they were significant—and realizing that time does indeed heal all, at least on these microscopic levels, as we forget the minor and major betrayals that dictated our whole thought processes a decade ago. Look at how great everything turned out, or at least how great things are today! There was a time that this person meant so much to me, and that smile was my favorite smile. It was a smile that controlled me. It controlled me for a year and a half, actually, but that was nearly a decade ago. This cacophonous music underlying our small and insignificant conversation once energized me more than it did that night. I nodded my head along to the repetitive beat.

Driving home, I smiled and reminisced of small moments, of first dates, of studying in someone’s apartment at this university that I passed on my left—that person whose name I can barely remember but who once was a friend—of times that I had heard and sung along to these songs sitting in the middle back seat of someone’s beat up 1992 Camry, sound fed through auxiliary cords in a tape deck. Occasionally the music would cut out with a click to turn over the tape, and we’d pause, laughing, and then the music would cut back in. I had no concept of my own mortality back then. I suppose it has something to do with the natural evolution of my prefrontal cortex (that’s what I hear, at least). Whose party were we going to that night? Did I know them? Didn’t someone try to throw me in the pool? I passed along a street and remembered, this is where his parents used to live, behind that vitamin store.

July 8th is always a day of raw emotion, where I somehow channel my inner toddler and am prone to break into tears and demand a party dress with tulle and princess ruffles and a cake with strawberries. Well, figuratively, at least. I insist on a level of attention and love that is simply unreasonable for a full grown woman to expect, and while I understand this intellectually, that vortex is virtually impossible to avoid. This year, I broke into tears over an egg and cheese bagel and an iced coffee, while sitting alone at a donut shop owned by an old Vietnamese woman. It’s a temporal wormhole, a passage into moments and memories that may not otherwise sit at the front of my mind, that I may not otherwise slip in and out of so effortlessly. It’s that mixture of feeling one’s own mortality, and an acute awareness of time, and those heightened expectations, like this has to be a marked, moment equally memorable to all others. I can remember every year. It’s a day of reliable sunshine, climate change be damned.