Arem Travels

There is a stretch of road running east along the I-8 towards San Diego’s golden string of beaches that cuts through Mission Valley. Sometimes I leave my borrowed room there in Hotel Circle and run the asphalt so I can breathe chaparral air. A cement barrier is all that separates me from the highway with its thousand bright and bug-eyed cars blurring steely through the night. Mine is an anxious mind; yet I throw myself into this tumult and feel a kind of lightning rattle through my limbs, a tempest opening its eye. I run toward the sea. It does not matter I will not make it—I just need to know I can travel a little while. 

The hotels that give this place its name spread out like castles or casinos on either side of the long asphalt divide, while in the hills above the rich have homes, and everywhere palm trees tower overhead, dancing lazy to the rhythm of a summer’s evening breeze. My headphones layer hip hop beats over the fury of the engines, my lungs fill up with the smog and grease and industry of this place that perfume the night like chimeric flowers. No stillness exists in this place carved into the valley: we have mastered the hills and subjugated the earth. Still there is a strange beauty in the shifting wails of the passing automobiles like bright ants directed this way and that by some invisible queen beneath the cement and sewage and earth. Orange red skies herald the coming night, and as it darkens, the skyline takes on a polluted, burning glow; the neon cries out in the night: “vacancy”, “free Wi-Fi”, “Welcome!”

Travelers slide past on Byrd and Lime or foot, concealing from each other our eyes. These people have business to attend to, in conference halls and malls, abandoned lots and dusty motel sheets. This is a place of passing and leaving and always-movement. A couple rides past, bikes loaded up with gallon liners, water bags, a shovel strung across rusted, pitted bars. Unleashed hounds trail the nomads in the night.

I am travelling somewhere too. My aging vision blurs the signs, turning them supernova at the edge line of my sight. My body has found its rhythm now; my mind stretches gloriously free from routine. The past and future are my realms here and I hold providence over them as a king over his territories. I stray here or there and reveal some memory or dream, feel the texture of it; taste it; let it fill me with its elsewhere before drifting off to some midnight repository. At all times all things are occurring in constant, perfect chaos, so that as I am running despite my bum knee sweat tickling down my chest people giving birth and dying killing crying as some volcano erupts like lovers and plates shift toward remembrances of Pangea, and now a star comes into existence while another shutters out, like god cut the power. The scope of reality—the idea of it blots for a moment the half-blind struggles of my infinitesimal existence. But now I have gone to a place where no human can linger long and, with a single glimpse over the theoretical precipice, I fall back toward the body in the night.

The hotel signs come into focus. I feel the wet cotton of my skin. My temporary home glitters up ahead. My watch renders this experience into stupid ones and zeroes: time, distance, calories burned. These are ancillary to the small gem of enlightenment I have unearthed on my travels—that little moment where I saw I was everyone and everything, and everything was me.

But nothing lingers long, even for fools who hope to put truth down in words.

Names hold power, and Hotel Circle is aptly named. Few call it home, for it is not a destination but a respite, a stopping-over from one place to the next along the path of our lives. That’s the thing about this country of longer-than-Roman roads, of brighter-than-daylight-nights: there is always something more, waiting out of sight. When I go others will take my place, and so the circle remains unbroken still.

This story first appeared in slightly different form in The Acorn Review