Shirt: c/o Threadless * Skirt: ModCloth * Cardigan: H&M * Boots: Dolce Vita for Target * Necklace: ModCloth * Cameo ring: grandmother's * Gold bangle: Grandmother's
This is a sister post to the guest post I wrote for the lovely Lisa at Archives. She asked me to write about a favorite road trip or vacation memory. Part of my response is there, on her blog, and part is here, in this post.
Joe and I bought a car in August. I had a car for the first year that I lived in Chicago, and then realized that it was more of a burden than a boon. so for the next two years, we lived in the city, happily sans vehicle, taking public transportation, or our feet, anywhere we needed to go. And then Joe found out he'd be moving out of the city over the summer. We knew we'd have to bite the bullet and spring for a car, or we'd never. see. each. other. again. (Yes, the drama is necessary for the proper telling of the story). So we hemmed, and hawed, and test drove, and haggled (and I had many near-nervous breakdowns), and we finally found our match in Thor/Heidi (depending on the day, the car is either an impressively powerful Norse god, or an adorable blond with pigtails).
Now, Theidi and I go on a mini-road trip every weekend to go see Joe. We brave the traffic of the city (and I risk giving myself a semi-truck-shaped ulcer) and take the drive into the heart of the midwest to spend the weekend with our man. I was worried, when he moved, that it would be a difficult transition. I'd done long distance before, and had both great success and great failure, so I was skeptical about how this would work. It's incredibly hard to take two lives, that were intertwined as much as ours were, and pull them apart for a piece of every week, only to try to braid them together again each weekend. I was nervous, but committed, and I think that we both knew that it was worth the work and risk it might involve. And I found that I kind of loved the drive. It's not my very favorite thing, by a long-shot, but there's something wonderful about physically moving through space, from one part of life to another. I love the transitional feeling of driving (and taking long-distance trains, too). You can see your world shifting and changing as you pass through suburbs, small towns, and fields of grain and cattle. The transition is more real to me in a car than it is in a plane, where your travels consist of one sterile environment after another, and you don't realize that you've gone anywhere at all until you leave the airport. In a car, on my mini-road trip, I can see my life changing bit by bit, and I've come to identify the start of the weekend by that change.
So my response to Lisa's original prompt of "road trip or vacation memory" is really only about the road trip. When I drive out to see Joe, I'm not taking a vacation. We're just continuing the part of our lives that we left off on last weekend. We do fun stuff, of course, and try to take time to just hang out, but we also try to maintain the regular routine of our lives. Our time together is not an exception to the rule, not a time where anything goes, not a time where you're on hold from the real world. Our weekends together are the real world, and we work hard to make it feel that way. I don't go out of town every weekend to take mini-vacations with my boyfriend. Instead, I live my life in two places now, and both are equally real, rewarding, and rich. It just takes a weekly road trip to get back and forth.
Title song: Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Road Trippin'"
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