︱tape: 05 - cruise︱

we owned a dull forest green jeep with a stripe embossed under the cabin, the kind of vehicle that made us campers of the americas with its roads that parted to cliff sides and pine forests where we could lay a blue tarp sheet next to a tent. stories told over the fire but I could not remember any of them as the from the glowing pit, the twigs and branches slowly snapped and i thought as we sat here, would there be some tear that would threaten to break us apart, the truth of our silence that only waited for the end of the trip, the schools that we’d go to, the work that we’ll have to be at soon while the boughs of the firs and damp wood would blow away within the air conditioner as the jeep carried us through the highway where rest stops would appear before all congregating back to the plazas and intersections just off the interchanges as the grasses receded under the exit ramp, back to the concrete we walked on.

rust bubbled at the side until it tore into the floorboards, eroding at the wheel well. despite some patching, my father ultimately resolved to cover the wound with the mats. i had even driven the jeep sometimes to school and never noticed any wind creep into the interior’s grey stitched seats that might unravel in the disintegrating vehicle, jerking to a stop and for a moment its heft still held upon the compressed front springs before tossing us back to the level earth, sitting upon its silver sun wheels buoyed by thick tires. In my first year of university, the jeep’s door caved in from exiting a plaza, its fate not left to eventual disappearance but to an extravagant end of cracked glass that fractured the sky until white rivers bled light and everything outside, even the car lodged within the warped metal of the door, its inner frame catching it like a net seeming unreal, even the discussion with the driver of the car and my mother of how to settle the accident must have seemed like sounds trying to panic itself into a balanced way of settling affairs, that objective law that kept life going in some way. perhaps that jeep was like home, where for a moment, everything outside its windows softened with only brief flickers of dried grass at the sides of the road, crooked in the wind and when i sat in the back, the world seemed a bit smaller.

when my grandfather was in hong kong, he left his chrysler lhs for occasional use. my father would then have to move it like rearranging unneeded luxuries, a thankless task among the many he did until he only sat quiet at the dinner table, telling us to not to talk and eat, what quiet he could where he finally didn’t need to anything for once, watching action movies in the dark letting the flashing light of gunfire flicker across the room and he broke into one of their one liners while we ate in hopes i would laugh but i only stared, only our chopsticks clinked at the glossed finish of the bowl almost tolling this silence of ours, the only thing that seemed to elude these sudden outbursts. such incompleteness came from those laughs never given, things never done, the chinese i didn’t learn unlike the kids learning things every day or when thinking of the kids who wanted to play soccer or have hobbies, i only remained in my room, stacking boxes into cities, crouching behind these buildings with toy cars. even as i grew, perhaps there was a hope that they would seem too small and that I would seek to fill some vague hunger for life. perhaps, to my father this world to him were these doings that we just had to do, no matter what and that our lazy summer afternoons and their warmth would soon fade in this coarse ushering towards growing up even as we never listened to the consequences behind those reprimands that made him a father, even with all the English I knew but unable to hold anyone near as I couldn’t think of anything to say apart from declaration and in the small field that swell in a hill from the pool of pavement, I could only run past everyone else, past everything, perhaps seeking for the forests and sand pits to become these soft greens that enwrapped us from car windows, the mechanics within the engine that burned until they were floating and in my limbs, perhaps I could push myself from the earth to a plane where even the unsteady growth of branches could be bathed in green as fields receded as if waves, soaking into the blue from light that knew more than just burning.

he parked the chrysler lhs at the side of the street while my father on friday nights to move the other cars a toyota tacoma pickup truck with a bullish snout that my father started using for outdoor trips, a subaru forester station wagon in lieu of the jeep and a white dodge ram encumbered by toolboxes with a mirror off a stem from the rear that looked like a doctor’s utensil, perhaps an instrument of precision demanded of my father in his work at a sanitation company. wrapped in tarp, the boat sat on a trailer whose wheel crushed grass on the lawn. my grandfather’s chrysler was left in front of the garage, a luxurious sedan that might make people think we once came into a great deal of money . its long hood bent to the steel waterfall-like grille that sat atop of the rotund front bumper protruded out. the chrysler lhs was the equivalent of an aston martin or if you wanted to be historically precise, it was based on a lamborghini coupe prototype in the 1980s. it was this kind of wealth that my grandparents seemingly brought whenever they arrived from hong kong wearing suits and other formal clothes. my grandfather liked to wear vacation dress-shirts that swam with flowing marquees of high end brands with gold serif titles and crown, a golden necklace swayed on his swarthy neck. as a child, i was able to ask my grandfather about the places he went and he would tell me where certain cars were made. he spanned a world of passing highways where airplanes made landings in glass sculptured airports to where executives greet each other on mosaic tiled floors. whatever that image may convey, i suppose i mean that he enamoured me with the flows and movements of the modern world.