It didn’t have to happen. Not the recession. Not the decrepit senior citizen retirement center nor the 1970’s camper van. Not the bad jobs, broken genes, messed up marriages or any of it.
One abnormal chromosome may have grown a necessary second arm making it easier to hold that particular branch of the family tree, or maybe a different branch altogether — one that wasn’t so solitary and lightweight.
The jukebox needle may have landed on a different song. The man may have decided to stay in that night, catch up on reading or get up early to lift some weights maybe, and he might have found the small back of a different woman to guide across the small linoleum dance floor in that roadside bar just outside Nashville, Tennessee.
If anything their large family might have started later on, and the trips from town-to-town may have been fewer, and the jobs might have been more plentiful, and the volume in each motel room would have been lowered just a touch after midnight, just enough for the kids to hear themselves think already.
I might have been the child someone handed a gold star to. You might have been the friend pulling up to the curb with a borrowed bike and together we’d ride long into the sunset, flinging beer bottles as far as we could across the asphalt parking lot behind the 7-Eleven and our tiny arms would flex like little sausages.
We’d shoplift cigarettes and teach ourselves how to smoke. You’d wave the smokey air and say no-no it’s like this, and the noise would’ve been the regular sounds of traffic and us snickering with the scratchy sound of flint punctuating the air every now and then, and we’d trade stories about the end of the world and where we’d land all victorious in it.
You’ll say, parents are all the same and I’d believe you. If a bridge wasn’t so complicated we could start building one right now. We might not wait thirty years, let’s start tonight.
I’ll throw my stuff in a trash bag and shuffle out the front door while everyone else is snoring away — my brother talking in his sleep most likely — and I’ll hop on the back of your bike and we’ll go chase sherbet sunsets until the end of time.
I consider this in the seconds I’m waiting for my card to clear. Across the world another daughter may be looking for her mother’s unmistakable flash of red hair, a deep crimson flame easy to spot against the clinical shades of the templated hospital rooms filled with nonagenarians, mylar balloons, tulips and fruit cups; an unmistakable fiery voice might fill the space with an intonation delivered like artillery, spreading like wildfire and shaking something loose inside of her.
I’ll never meet the other daughter but maybe — occasionally, somewhat at least— we can telegraph to each other a promise to always be wild on the inside.
Maybe somewhere a girl sits reading in the darkness, inside of a tiny box in some unforgiving city, tuning out the noise and waiting for her life to start, the real one that is not the dress rehearsal.
She waits on a planet that spins, knowing but unknowing, on a platter that so easily turns in either direction before dissolving into dust.