Disappearing Somewhere Along I-95, On the Road From Delaware to Alabama
by Riel Saylor
six years old, strapped
to a pink and black booster seat
in the back of my father’s
red Volkswagen Bug,
I was already learning the art
of disappearing.
then a husk of baby-blue Walmart clothes
and white New Balance sneakers
I’d soon outgrow and replace
with new faces in the coming years,
soon to live tied down in tight braids
by my mother, who’d comb and tug
at my strung-out curls she refused to let me cut.
in this way, she hardly differed from my father,
now pressing his bare foot to the accelerator,
ankle tattooed with the Japanese kanji
for his new wife’s name,
blasting off from the South College Avenue
exit onto I-95, drowning us both
in a torrent of country music
that would last for eighteen hours,
only broken up by intermittent visits
to gas stations or Love’s Travel Stops
where he’d leave me alone and afraid
at the pump while he went inside to pay.
Love’s. what an ironic name.
must have been the same kind of love
that made the court system turn me
into another piece of my parents’ property
to be disputed over, the same kind of love
that made my father carry me around
empty parking lots on the last days
of those visitations, sobbing about
how he’d cry himself to sleep at night
missing me, trying to make me cry too.
the same kind of love that made him
send emails threatening to have the cops
drag me out of my house if I wouldn’t
get in that hellish car myself.
the same kind of love that forced my mother
to stand back and let it all happen.
states away, I still saw her,
static mirage standing at the handoff spot
under the red and white
light of the TGI Friday’s sign
as my father pushed me into the car,
leaving me with a black
composition book and a few markers
to keep me occupied on the long road.
there I first learned to bite back
my disordered voice,
already strangled by six years
of anxiety that would only get worse,
and contain myself between
those wide-ruled lines.
there I first learned to play
the puppet, slip into the shadows
of the back seat,
be taken, and be taken from.