I want someone I can wake up with, someone who will ride shotgun as I sing outwards along the curve of a river. Sometimes this city is too small, the roads too slow. I vibrate at a thousand frequencies between the Willamette and the Columbia, kept awake by the thought of water shivering outwards against the banks, swelling against dams making lakes of what was formerly a narrow, treacherous current.
Warm in the radiant night, somehow both awake, I rise, too shivering, too awake all of a sudden to remain in the walls of the house. I am wide awake. I want an adventure want the warmth of someone beside me at 3AM.
There is the song of Nicole Blackman in me. I want a list of atrocities done in your name. I want to shake you from your sleep. Wake up, come with me down a road in a fast car, a fast truck, a dawn where the only coffee isn't artisan, it's 7-11. I want to blare Judas Priest in the pre-dawn night.
We could be at Umatilla by sunrise, watch the sun rise between the walls of the river gorge. The water goes golden slowly. It is a redemption, to watch the path of day overtake the shadow of night. Twenty minutes from that is a Denver omelet and something like rebirth, like the end of an adventure and the understanding that there's always another one out there.
I want you to understand that I am every spontaneous adventure you refuse to allow me, every adventure you refuse yourself, and every time you roll over and ignore it, you kill a part of me. We are a people in whose bodies old sea-seeking rivers roar with blood, and you deny this, deny the very salt in your veins. You fit me into boxes, small ones, and ready me to ship. I am a product, nameless, flavorless, to be picked up and resumed with.
I can't love you, for you have no heart for me, and I was never meant to be put in a brightly-colored box. I cannot be the woman you would have me step into the shoes of.
I want you to hear the song of an engine like I hear, like a promise.
But the river is here, and the river is wild, the river is me. I am the engine at dawn, and I leave you behind me. The river seeks the sea, and I seek the sunrise and the lovesong of a battered pickup truck.