Come Alone, No Police

 

 Its moments like these I forget that anything has changed at all. The sky is bright blue, the clouds lazy puffs of white, the grass is electric green and the dirt path cuts a seductive trail through it, to the infinite horizon. I’m out for a hike. A vacation. One of the many backpacking trips written in dry erase marker on the whiteboard stuck on my fridge. Then Druggie Dave starts muttering to his hallucinations behind me, and I snap out of my daydream. This isn’t a bucket list trip; this is life. Just me and Dave and an eternity of endless roads, shuffling from town to town, looking for fuck knows what. At least that was my story. Dave was looking for drugs, always. Addicts didn’t stop being addicts just because the world ends.

It was springtime though, which was lovely. There was nothing like velvet hills covered in a watercolor pallet of wildflowers to rekindle my love for meandering. During the dark days of winter, I’d almost considered settling down. The only thing that stopped me was where I’d found myself, Bakersfield, or at least what had once been Bakersfield. Of course it was much nicer now the smog fog of the Central Valley had dissipated with the death of the combustion engine, but it was still Bakersfield. So, I moved on

We were now just passing through King City, and the earth was in bloom. It was like that moment in the Wizard of Oz, suddenly everything was in color.

“Follow the yellow brick road!” I sang, a spring in my step.

Dave giggled behind me

“You remember that movie, Dave?”

He didn’t respond. I snuck a peek over my shoulder to see if he was still with me, or if he had been distracted by one of his hallucinations. He found some mushrooms a couple of days ago, and had been living off a steady diet of them ever since.

I saw he was still shuffling along behind me, neck craned back, staring at the sky. Probably seeing flying monkeys or something. I shrugged to myself, and continued walking. Around the next bend in the road a field of poppies spread out in front of me, a million golden heads bobbing in the breeze. I bent to pick one and when a did I heard a screech behind me. It was Dave, face white as a ghost.

“Now you’ve done it” his voice was deep with fear, “the police, that’s illegal, the police!” he turned and ran faster than I would have believed he could, back towards where we came. I didn’t bother going after him. I could do with some time by myself again. Perhaps I would head to the coast, get out of the Central Valley before the summer heat set in. The last time I’d been near the ocean it was obscured by the smoke of the city burning to the ground, but the fires were most certainly out now. Who knows, perhaps my house was still standing. I thought again of my whiteboard, my bucket list, on my fridge, and I started walking towards home.