It’s about the journey, not the destination, right?
I ended up staying in the big city an extra day so I could pick up medication for my mom’s dog. My mom lives in a village too small for even a gas station and three or four dogs there have foot cancer. Anyone who cares knows that it’s because of the acid rain from the mine. Unfortunately, the people who care aren’t the people who can do anything about it.
It’s a long beautiful drive to my mom’s place. Everything is green and the bluebells are blooming. I love bluebells. I saw some lupine leaves, but no flowers yet. I love lupine, too.
I had dinner with my mom and met a bunch of people that she works with. “Don’t say your a stripper,” she hissed at the last moment.
Of course.
My friends are all herbalists and whores, poets and anarchists. In other words, people who really don’t care if I’m a stripper. So, while I know that it’s not really the most respectable thing to be a stripper, it doesn’t really occur to me that I should lie about it. But lie I did.
Then I moved the fuck on (I’m telling you, this is a great strategy for life: if something’s not right, just move the fuck on). The sun hadn’t set in days, but something dusky and beautiful happened around midnight. I stopped and stood in the wind, at the top of a mountain. Cars drove by, but no one looked, so I went down the hill and stripped naked to let the wind bite me back into my skin before driving on.
Two AM, coming into the big huge city, the headlights coming towards me started doing something funny. I slowed down, moved to the side of the road, tried to figure out what was going on through the road haze. It was a little truck and it was sliding to a stop, roof all smashed in after rolling several times.
A few cars stopped behind it, I jumped out and ran across the road and the median to the truck. There was just one woman inside, unconcious, bleeding from the head and the nose. There was a nurse in one of the other cars that had stopped, and she seemed very confident, holding the woman’s neck immobilized and trying to stop the bleeding. I donated my shirt to the effort and turned away to call 911… and got an “all circuits are busy, your call will be answered by the 911 people in the order it was recieved…” What the hell?
Finally someone got through to the 911 people and a bunch of cop cars showed up. No ambulance, just a bunch of cop cars. The officers were just yelling at people trying to figure out what had happened, and weren’t at all interested in helping the unconcious woman in the truck. I was getting pissed so I went to leave, but of course I had to have permission from a cop first. Finally they let me leave, but, um, I couldn’t find my keys. So there I was, topless and keyless, until some guy gave them back to me.
I wish I’d had some laborador tea handy to help stop the bleeding. This is the fourth accident I’ve seen in the last few months, and the second with big traumatic injury. I’m starting to think I should be carrying a first aid bag with all that stuff convenient.
Now I’m in the big huge city sitting with one of my most beloved friends while she comes off a narcotic. This is always my fate in the big huge city. The people I love most move here and get on drugs (sometimes for very legitimate reasons) and can’t find or afford anymore just when I arrive. She’s sleeping now, and she looks like a fairy. Any moment she’ll wake up, stretch her arms, and take flight.