The Interdependent Independence of My Future Subaru.

The Interdependent Independence of My Future Subaru

by james bezerra

I am a comma splice. I tell the Yoda-looking lady at the bodega that I am thinking about buying a Subaru Outback. She rings up my coffee and has nothing to say about my future Subaru.  Her bodega does not sell auto parts, only air fresheners shaped like trees that smell like strawberries. “Because it seems like a reliable and all-around car,” I tell her, “all-wheel drive, you know?” She unfurls her reptilian alien finger and her yellowed nail points toward the air freshener aisle as if to say that is all she has to offer me.

I join independent thoughts, often incorrectly. I can sleep in the back of a Subaru Outback, after I buy it and drive it out of the city headed west where the sky is so big and blue and endless that it just rolls along like that story of the one long endless sheet of paper on which Kerouac wrote On the Road while on a three week bender in 1951. The sky rolls like that above me as I cross deserts and sleep on the sides of the roads in the back of my Outback out there in Utah or Wyoming or the Dakotas. The American outback and its wide smattering of stars that wait for me to see them.

Because I fight back the imposed loneliness of the city by pulling down on myself the voluntary loneliness of the empty roads out west.

I jam together those things which are incongruent. I can’t possibly afford a Subaru. I paid for this coffee in change. I go back to the bodega to ask Yoda how much the air fresheners cost, but I don’t buy one - just feel the cellophane between my fingertips - because trees don’t smell like strawberries. They’re incongruous ideas. Each is a whole on its own, but they don’t belong together.

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