Aim High in Steering

You are probably one of those people who likes to say "Look up! You might miss something!" when you see somebody walking with their head tilted downward. When things are good, they are glorious! The sun is radiant; the darkness is vast! I can just tell. You are one of those sorts.

I took your advice, you know. It wasn't just because of the scolicephobia, either. If anything, those worms are a reason to look down. No, I stopped staring at the sidewalk because you convinced me I was missing something. The sky. You convinced me that I must be sad, walking around like that, and that I was bound to bump into somebody. The implications were that it would be the wrong somebody, too. You pointed at the most shriveled, lonely people, hunched over and closed off. You told me I'd turn out just like them.

It wasn't just you, though. It was everybody. In Driver's Ed., which was mandatory for graduation even though I wasn't learning to drive, they made a point of telling me, every day for three months, everywhere I should be looking instead of the ground in front of me. Mostly I looked at a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, but sometimes I looked at the chalkboard, at dotted lines of sight and bold letters that said "AIM HIGH IN STEERING", and I listened to a man that I suspected was illiterate list off ten thousand mirrors and dials a driver was supposed to be looking at when they were driving down the highway, maintaing a speed of sixty-five miles per hour, aiming high, pointing their vehicle towards far-off horizons.

You probably like road trip stories, because people are always aiming high and steering for the West Coast, where there is Sky with a capitol "S" and giant sequoias reaching up to it. I cannot drive, of course, and I went to California when I was seven years old, and mostly I remember watching college students draw pictures in the sand after dark at Santa Cruz and watching Elena's Barbie Jeep almost drift to sea at Treasure Island. I remember sand in our Oreos. I do not recall, though there are photographs depicting it, the dim sequoia forest and my smallness in the face of its immensity. I did not have your taste for grand juxtapositions.

You told me that I was remembering it wrong, and that there were impressive, jagged stretches of coast that I once stood overlooking, and all the while I was preoccupied with little sea anemone in tide pools. You shamed me. You convinced me that detachment was only acceptable when it looked dreamy and faced upward and sunned its face. I think somebody once told you to get your own head out of the clouds, and you refused to listen, and it made this very charming story. I must have liked it, or I wouldn't have started looking up.

The problem was just that I kept stubbing my toes, and tripping over uneven pavement, and once last year I was hurrying through the rain to a lecture and stepped on a little worm. I felt it. Under my shoe, in that split-second, I felt it. I glanced to the ground, where I hadn't been looking, and at the sight of what I'd done I was immediately sick all over the muddy ground. With shaking hands and a churning stomach, I watched the flooded sidewalk and felt the consequences of your crummy advice until arriving, soaking wet, at the lecture hall.

I wonder if you remember the last time your shadow kept you company, and followed you around on a sunny day. It was probably a long time ago. You've probably been busy basking in the glorious warmth of that great celestial sphere. I'm sure that is a nice way to spend the afternoon. So is looking at moss, if you're interested. So is dipping your foot in a cool river on a hot day, and watching your footprints evaporate on the dusty, practically sizzling granite slabs of the shore. So is watching minnows in the reedy lake shallows, where they dart between ancient, twisted tree roots. So is wearing down a piece of sidewalk chalk until one section of driveway, pebbles and all, is vivid pink. Of course, you are right. I am probably missing something. For the life of me, I cannot find Orion's belt.

Photographs taken by my sister, who knows a thing or two about a thing or two.