A Breath Until Forever (2 page)

Meredith wished she had companionship sometimes, even something as small as an acquaintance to keep her company. She had often seen hitchhikers on the road on her travels, and have often thought about picking them up, but a lonely woman was a sitting duck for trouble and so she always used her best judgment and just slowly passed them on by. Feeling the urge for human companionship of light conversation and company tortured her sometimes. Travels like this were always where she was frequently away from her husband, who usually kept the company of mistresses in different cities, however she always looked away and gave him the blinded eye. It was not fair to her that he had his extramarital affairs, however, as much as she was aware of them, she knew that when she returned, he would forever be the loyal, doting husband that he always was, not breathing a word of his multiplicity infidelities, as if none of them ever existed, as if a stranger had participated in such bad marital behavior. Still, she thought, it would be nice to have him join her sometime on the road. In a few more years, the calling work for painters was far and few between, thanks to new technology in which they could print out artwork by machines. “All of this and nobody to share with.” She said to the coniferous greens that rolled by her truck in one colorful blur as she kept driving, playing with the stereo trying desperately to find a radio station that she would be even remotely interested in.

Drives like this always put Meredith into a spell. She always felt so alone on these trips. She may have had a dog at home, a teenager son, a husband, but she was lonely as hell, and as lonely as one could ever possibly be. She had lost touch with many of her friends through the years, her son was in military school by choice of her husband, the dog, Luca, who was a Golden Labrador mix was old and sick, and because of it, had a disdain dislike for human touch of any kind.

Meredith knew certain affluent influences throughout the art community and the man who owned the art shop on Union street in the center of Seattle, and the stocky butcher at the Italian Deli where she bought all of her fresh meats. She also had many professional relationships with many different art galleries and vendors, who sometimes picked up a painting or two for a decent price, and sometimes even made limited prints in which she received a rather fair royalty of the profits. But other than that, she hardly knew anyone well, at least not on that deep level where she would consider anyone a real and serious true friend of the ordinary kind. She often considered herself more of a gypsy; a butterfly on the run, from the lamb of social nets where if they caught her, she would surely die of being imprisoned.

She thought about her husband Benjamin. Although now married for a long and lengthy 18 years, she had left him more than fourteen years ago. Perhaps not physically, but in an emotional sense. She was forty years old now, and Benjamin was a decade older, at a mature fifty. Benjamin had dreams of becoming an artist himself, but after getting Meredith pregnant, he succumbed to the realities of financial hardship of having a baby and used his Law Degree to get a job at a job firm in Seattle. He had many art receptions before that, and had quite the following and although his pieces went for scores of money, it wasn't enough to support and raise a young and upcoming family. So since then he had always felt resentful of Meredith for pursuing her passion and dream of becoming an artist after being a stay at home mom for many years.  When he was home it was as if she was invisible. They could be in the same room but neither would acknowledge that either were there. And when there had to be acknowledgment, he drove her complete insane at times, and so often she would rock Daniel to sleep while she sang lullabies not to ease his crying, but her empty soul. Meredith didn't feel loved or valued or appreciated as a wife, and both Benjamin and Meredith knew it. So why stay? Why does the sun give us sunshine? For the responsibilities one feels when one gives a promise. Just like the sun gives the promise of the day, Meredith had given her husband, the promise of a wife.

Her long absences seem to fulfill that void sometimes though; sometimes leaving for up to a month at a time, it made it easier for her to stay in a loveless marriage. She knew that, and whenever she was offered a commissioned painting job, she would jump at the chance to take it. She was aware of the fact that Benjamin was resentful of what she did but her decision to stay married was a personal one, and she took it with the utmost of respect. One time when she was gone, she returned to find a very disheartening note. “I love you, but I don't love you in that way. I am over at a special friends house and will not be returning until you come back home from your next trip. Please forgive me. Love, Benjamin.”

When she was on the road, she didn't stay in touch. She would go weeks and weeks without talking to her husband. Not even the slightest thought about a phone call from the convenience of a pay phone on those shady corners. And she wouldn't have had it any other way. It wasn't as if she was the only one. Benjamin chose not to bother her either. So often they have she even signed divorce papers one time and caught a plane for New York City the next day to go visit and live with her mother, but Benjamin asked for her return. And she returned. She always returned. There was nothing ever there, except for her freedom, and it was all that she had. Not many husbands would allow a wife to be on the road for weeks at a time, without at least checking in on her every now and then. It was a very strange, and bizarre circumstance, and relationship, but it was what it was, and both Benjamin and Meredith accepted it without any complaint. They still had sexual relations with another, slept in the same bed, shared kisses and intimacy and matrimonial fluid, however both were not married to each other in that sense, although there was a piece of paper that said otherwise. In the eyes of the law, they were Mr. and Mrs. Hurley, but to Benjamin and Meredith, they were two strangers, who put up with each others eccentricities, who fulfilled each others sexual needs every once in awhile, just so that they could coexist with another, because they didn't know any other way.

At Gibraltar, Meredith stopped for the night, at a cozy little inn off the coast of Morro Bay. She didn’t like spending too much money on the road. The more inexpensive, the better. The less money on the road, the more money in her pocket to spend at the retail fleet of shopping malls in Seattle, and expensive coffee drinks at coffee shops. She loved shopping, but she loved coffee even more.

Although her home was full of the comfort and luxuries of upper middle class of satin sheets and a comfortable and sturdy bed, the Brant Inn, was less than to be expected for the price, and was full of small, cave like rooms where curtains dripped from the 50's of olive greens and paisley, and a green shag carpet laid out like a hurt animal, bald in some areas, stained in others, and it lay out like crime scene pictures. She carried her suitcase into her room, and plunked it on the bottom of a single bed. The bed was old, topped with a dirty comforter stained of semen, and a thin as a pancake pillow headed the head rest area. Two table lamps, both big and swollen, almost bulbous like and painted a very ugly aqua color, sat on one of each end table. She laid in bed and read The Prophet, and drank a glass of some seriously cheap wine, smelling the stench of cigarette smoke all around her as she puffed and chain smoked through a whole pack of cigarettes. She was stressed. This had been the biggest job she had ever done, and this guy was paying her a whole lot of money. She just hoped that she wasn't going to screw it up. She was a good painter, but she was never good underneath pressure.

In the morning she got up and did Hatha Yoga for twenty minutes, something she was taught at Chakti Yoga in Seattle, meditated for ten minutes, and then sat on the floor, legs crossed, eyes bitterly closed, thinking about her life for a moment, where she was at, just to put it into a deep and spiritual perspective. She didn't like what she thought, so she got up, packed up, and headed out on the road again. She had many more miles to go, and not too many more memories to keep her company.

Crossing into Nevada she continued to drive into the merging of highways until she she met the I-80W. She stopped off to get gas, and off the exit, the flat country she drove into was found to be a landscape set out to be nothing less than simply wonderful and a big heart of America's heartland. From there, she took some random roads, just for the hell of it, stopping many times on the side of the road, sitting with a sketchpad, quickly drawing up doodles that randomly filled her artistic head. She had seen many different beautiful locations on her travels, ones that took her far far away even from the country of America, but there was something so much more beautiful of those lands, off beaten paths, and off track where it wasn't located on the map but usually led by the direction of her soul's heart.

On the morning of July 12
th
, it took her a few hours to slice through the upper east of the road and take a road off the I-40 and up into the dusty pits of Tennessee and into a ghost town she saw advertised in a brochure at one of those convenient stores when she had pulled over to fill her gas tank. Newsoms Station that left the remnants of an old train station and the old mill on Harpeth River. Gas prices were high now. Thirty nine cents a gallon and it cost her $4.29 to fill up the tank. She had paid cash, and felt horrible giving away her hard earned cash at those ridiculous prices. The road was gravelly, old and was cluttered with old rugged stone that bore treachery, and there was the rickety building in which was now a partial ruin of olden days. She spent all afternoon looking for the beauty in such ugliness and thought of only the restoration and back to a time when the town was in its prime of gun slinging ways and the original nit and grit of people who were restless and always hungry for more. It had been such a long time since she was really hungry for more.

Meredith returned back to her Jeep Wrangler, now speckled with a red dirt that she had picked up on the traction of her growling tires that had took her straight into the heart of the ghost town. She left her door wide open, sat in the bucket seat, got in, but with her right hip in weight, and her left leg sticking out a little crooked on the support of the side, and she took a cigarette from out of her purse, to light it up. With a cigarette dangling from the spit of her mouth, she turned on the truck's battery, to turn on the radio. A song from her past came up. “Hello Stranger” by Barb Lewis. It was a song that always got to her every time she listened to it. Right in her gut. She hummed along with it a little, feeling the vibration of the pop emotive, build even more character in her soul. The chords could handle themselves well, as they danced like a playful devil, within the static of the radio, however she couldn't get herself to accompany it more, with singing like the singer, without tears filling her lonely eyes. She remembered the first time that she heard it. She had been full of booze, drinking rum and coke all night, after a dirty day of working as a waitress in her early 20's, and she had gone into a dive of a bar called the Flamingo's Hideout. The Flamingo's Hideout Bar was somewhere between disgusting and gross on the seedy part of town. That's where she met a cute young pilot, who had been drinking more heavily then her, smelling of smoke and booze, as if he hadn't showered for days. But although he smelled like an animal in a fire, there was a flame burning in his bright sky blue eyes, that pierced her like the sharpest of arrows. She had sat down, asked for another rum and coke, and when she went to go pay for it to the bartender, old crumpled up cash she had taken out from her bra, he had suddenly grabbed at her hand and told her quite softly but abrasive as if Clint Eastwood, “Put it away pretty girl.” He paid for her drink, plus a small tip, then gave Meredith a wink and a nod, followed by putting a hand on her knee. Not being touched by another man in a long, long terrible time, Meredith weakly gave into him, and the next thing she knew, the pilot and her were screwing each others brains out at a local motel that charged not by the night but by the hourly rate. And although the radio was not on, over and over in her head, Barb Lewis was singing to her in her head, almost taunting her making her feel guilty, of having sex, a one night stand, and opening up her womanhood to another man besides her future husband. The night that Meredith slept with the pilot, was the night that she lost her virginity. “Hello Stranger” Meredith had greeted in the bar. And when she left, as she closed the door behind him, she softly said, “Goodbye Stranger” then closed the door shut forever.

The road was really nice, and full of all of wonderful sights to see. When Meredith was a little girl, she wished that she could have traveled. When you are young, the world looks so different. More childlike and more beautiful. As if nothing could ever be touched by evil. She drove past the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and saw lots of deer, and some children playing out in the grand and green open fields. At a lake she stopped and took some sketches of the sun sinking into the reflections of the water. When she finished, she sat on the hood of the Jeep, drinking a bottle of water, having a well earned cigarette, and listening to the noises of nature, of birds and wallows and the river birch trees rustling in a charming wind.

As she thought and reflected, she thought about how nice it would be to have someone to share all of this with. The simple moments in life. The moments which make you happy and appreciate the life worth living. It couldn't be anyone, but someone who would appreciate the beauty of nature as much, if not even more so. She watched as the nomadic trees blew wildly and blurred by as she drove. She was getting older now, and she felt her life fading fast like a star in the sky that was dying. And this made her appreciate things a little more. She had a new perspective being in her middle years, which included her heart widening, and taking in all the small things as something much bigger, and more thankful for. She was learning through her many travels, that it wasn't necessarily the destination, but the journey itself that made life all worthwhile.