The Life of M

-Josh Ritter.

Fact, fact, fact. This is why I write. 

Driving is like cooking: anybody can do it, but the trick is to do it without burning the house down.

Driving is my prayer. Jiffy Lube and O’Reilly Auto Parts are my saints, a vehicle with four wheels and a V8 engine my chapel, and the road my pilgrimage. 

Yesterday, after driving two and a half hours to work a six-hour shift, I decided to drive another two and a half hours to catch the tail end of Girls’ Weekend. Since I literally decided this leaving the parking lot at work and I only ran home for my pj’s and swim suit, I didn’t have time to look at a map. I grabbed the GPS out of my cousin’s car and took off. 

Garmin and I, we had some differences from the get-go. She (the British lady) wanted me to go north, towards Houston, hop on I-10 and head that way. I said, ‘No, no, no’ and headed the opposite direction, knowing that through San Marcos is the way to go. Eventually, she acquiesced and we were on our way. 

When we got to Bastrop, Garmin wanted me to go left, past the turn off for San Marcos. I said, ‘You know, Garmin, I’ll give you one.’ So I followed the Garmin’s directions. The Garmin took me to Austin. Austin. I’m supposed to completely avoid Austin but the Garmin wants me to go right up to it, then skirt around the city. I did this because I had no choice but to trust the Garmin: I had no idea where I was going. 

It took me down 71, and then 290, through forty minutes of traffic and an infinite number of stoplights. Every other time I’ve been to The Most Beautiful Place in the World, I’ve gone through San Marcos, then Wimberly, and then halfway between San Marcos and Wimberly is the Road that Takes You to the Most Beautiful Place in the World (which is pretty beautiful in and of itself). 

However, due to my human error in trusting in the Garmin, we (Garmin and I) went around Austin and through Blanco. 

And then, on FM 165, as I came over this hill, the drive was suddenly made worth it. I gasped. You could see hundreds of miles into the distance. You could see the hazy outline of the next line of hills, and then another hazy outline beyond that. You can see the next five dips in the road. You can see houses and ranches and a bit of Blanco and probably unicorns and waterfalls if you looked hard enough. 

And then I gasped again because the road down was steep. But totally worth it. 

In the pool at night, in the middle of nowhere, the sky looked like twenty coats of 215. There are more stars in the sky than I remembered; it seems impossible that the sky could ever even be black with that much light up there. The big dipper was low enough in the sky, poised to reach down those few extra inches and scoop up some of the water out of the hot tub. The pool was as still as glass and the horizon formed a thin band separating it from the sky. You could see almost every star from the sky in the reflection of the water.

Without the lights on, things don’t seem so dark: the sky is that bright. But when a lighter catches and a flame glows, your eyes snap to the light and everything else falls into darkness. The tips of cigarettes were bright but in the rippling water, they looked like flickering fireflies. 

This is the most beautiful place in the world. 

The pantry is warm. Not hot, but just-right-toasty. There’s something about natural, morning light. It’s warm and wraps around your body like a blanket.

It’s not a very big window that lets the light in, so it slants and fills the room from the left corner of the small room where food is stored. It’s not a crazy cluttered pantry where you feel suffocated and afraid to take a step for fear of sending everything crashing down around your ears.

One on side: boxes of whole wheat pasta, jars of spaghetti sauce, Jello-sized packets of cherry Jello, Tupperware of chopped nuts, bags of tortilla chips. The kind of well-stocked that makes you want to cook dinner, not the kind of over-stocked that makes you want to hide from the glaring realization that you’ll never be able to use all of that food.

On the other side are kitchen appliances. They fit neatly in next to one another, not quarreling for space. A shelf for pitchers, a shelf for alcohol, a shelf for paper goods, a What-a-burger bag of ketchup packets. A rice cooker, a Kitchen Aid mixer, what vaguely resemble a waffle iron. 

There’s enough space on the floor for three bodies to fit comfortably, side by side. There’s enough room on each shelf for a small child. Big spaces require big things to fill it. Small spaces make you feel cozy, ensconced. The pantry is my new home. 

If God wanted me to be a runner, He would’ve given me smaller boobs. 

*how I burnt my tongue

*closing my windows

*how much I had to drink