When The Sun Rises

C h a p t e r 3

The Car was a black Ford Explorer. Model? I don't know. Its seatbelts were frayed and needed serious replacement which told me that the car was pretty old because otherwise the car was well-maintained.

The dashboard was covered by a clean gray dash mat, similar was the case with the seats.

The car strongly smelled of, I'm guessing, Daniel's cologne which was very potent and stirring. It smelled of cleanliness, discipline and a bit of melancholy.

There wasn't anything hanging from the car's rearview mirror which was new to my sight. Almost all cars have something hanging from their rearview mirror. Overall, the condition of the car made me perceive Daniel as a drab but polished person.

It had been more than three hours and my butt was starting to hurt, seriously. I kept shifting from my right butt cheek to left butt cheek trying my best to ignore the excruciating discomfort in my lower body but all in vain. My legs were starting to grow numb.

"Aren't you tired?" I asked him, hoping he'd say yes.

"Yeah, I was gonna say the same. Maybe we should stop for awhile." He turned his head from the windscreen and I noticed the grim darkness beneath his eyes.

"There should be a lodging house along the road somewhere. I'll stop when I see one." He said.

The two of us had eaten all the apples that I had packed in my bag and now I had nothing to fill my still-hungry stomach which was churning for food.

The road snaked between the dense groves of lofty pine trees and never seemed to end. The intensity of heat now had been subsided by the bloating clouds that had hindered the Sun and thus posed a balmy effect.

I opened the window and let the wind cheer me. The breeze made the strands of my hair, that were loose, fly with happiness. A few pickups zoomed by our side and enhanced the motion of the wind causing the wisps of my hair to fly even more.

The weather was very pleasant, it was the perfect picnic weather. The pine trees looked greener than the usual and the sky looked bluer. I hung my hand outside and moved it like the waves of water in a sea.

"Don't you have a home to go to?" I asked Daniel.

He didn't say anything first but then decided to speak.

"What's your definition of 'Home'?"

"Where you live?"

"Well.. I do have a home but I don't live in it exactly. I mostly spend my days in the car. Most of the stuff that I use in routine is in the back."

He answered, pointing in the back with his thumb.

"Are you kidding me? You have a home but you choose not to live there? You have a Mom who's actually worried about you but you choose to ignore her? Why?"

I couldn't help but wonder that. People like me (adopted) spend their whole lives seeking for their home, seeking for their parents, trying to shush the emptiness screaming inside them.

We spend our whole lives trying to calm our hearts by telling them that it's okay not to know whose vagina you came out of but that's the thing, every lullaby you sing to your heart to soothe its wounds would echo through out your sanity because there are no memories to fill the chambers of your heart.

Every friendly voice bounces inside you when emptiness has engulfed you in its embrace. Kindness becomes salt in the wounds.

♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢♢

Aurora had asked me a question that had a long and complicated answer. She doesn't know how tangled and complex my family life is.

I wasn't brought up by loving hands but rather time and pain. All the unhappy memories of my past had drawn me away from my parents and I did't feel connected to them anymore. All those bruises my father caused in my mind were far deeper than my mother's love and affection for me. If what my father used to do to me didn't worry her then neither should my absence.