Odometers

What is the distance traveled to have someone walk back into your life?

Can you roll back the numbers to re-start exactly where you left off?  Or are those miles stretched and unable to return back to a starting point?

He asked her to go for a ride for a relatively short trip in a relatively old truck.  She sauntered down the steps of the house, her colt-like walk obvious as she strode towards the vehicle...it was not a fast walk nor a slow one...a bit of dust kicking up with her steps...it was a purposeful approach.

She opened her own door because that was what she did...she didn't need his hand to clench open the metal and strength to pull the door open...she had all that.  She climbed up into the cab and looked at him, her eyes a bit wide with an "okay now what" glance.  He remembered looking past her, back to the steps of the house...back to when the door yawned open and she emerged...he remembered thinking of the anticipation he always felt when he saw her outlined against the frame...like a cut-out shadow that he instantly recognized.  He knew her shape, he knew her gait.  He could pick her out of a crowd of thousands just by her walk.

And she was now sitting across from him in the bench seat...

He turned the ignition and drove down the road, winding past the barn and settling onto the two lane road beyond her property...the windows were down so it was a white noise in the truck, her hair blowing a bit wildly and she kept pulling it behind her ears.  The truck rattled when hitting certain parts of the road, causing a slight bump in the cab, and she shifted slightly against the rhythm.

Sitting anywhere near her was like adjoining near the sun...the part closest to her was flushed, warm...that side of his face almost in a sunburn...the side of him closest...it was just a rule like gravity...it was almost physics...he could detect her in the next room...but near him it was like when the sun comes out from behind a cloud...illuminating what was once in a shadow...what was once cooler...

He remembered a time when they were on a dock...it was off of the James River and it must have been Autumn or just the end of summer...the sun was lower...the water beneath their feet...the way the colors shimmered against the green dark waters...a thousand dimes...just twinkling...and the way the sun made you feel in the afternoon...their thighs were touching each other, both in shorts...and he knew then that they had some unnamed connection...

Back in the truck the air was filled with the outside noises...she had to shout a little for him to hear her...and he kept saying a word over and over again...knowing she wouldn't hear him...

He kept saying love...

he said things like "I love being near you"
"I love the way you look right now"

He must have said things like that a hundred times but in the din of the cab she would never hear.  It wasn't a whisper...it was a release...an escape...through his thicket of brain and the soft muscles of his heart...it started like a virus, slowly wrapping him in...and permeating him.

She was liquid in his mind, melting parts of him...oxygenated air...

He couldn't roll back any feelings anymore...she was present and now with him forever...now firmly intertwined...no uncoupling...no decoupling...there wasn't a him anymore...at least the prior him.

There was only forward...like the dusty road in front of them, in the old truck still churning along waiting for the sun to set.