Two Weeks

Two weeks. You get two weeks vacation a year. Two months ahead you request the time off and hope the weather is good---hope the weather is good, hope you’re not ill because those two weeks are all there is every year. You put your request in and  hope your days are approved, hope no one in your department asked for the same days off. It’s a competition as is all of life: You compete for your position on the streets, compete to get your coffee, compete to be employee of the month. You compete to get your child in a good school. Compete to be the one the person you are into selects for pairing. And the days become weight. All this competition, all this work, all this struggle to keep a roof over your head, food, a car, enough distraction to keep you from wringing your hands, cutting your wrists. Two weeks. You win that competition, mark the calender on your phone, count the days: Forty. Thirty, Twenty. Ten. You pack, make a list, make sure you have everything needed to maximize your two weeks.

The day comes. You set out. It is morning and the traffic laughs and pulls at your shoulders. Playfully? Oh, you won’t be getting away that fast. This modern world won’t let you get away that easy. Maybe it’s all a big joke and the boss will text you between exits: Sorry, your two weeks has been cancelled. What would you do then? That thought as you pass the exits you pass when you drive to work.  The exit for work comes up. Out of habit, you signal to get in the right lane. You no longer consciously drive this highway. Are you really passing the exit? Really? Is the traffic removing its hands and setting you free? Yes…for two weeks.

The radio plays songs you’ve forgotten. Trucks throw small rock fragments at the windsheild. You watch your speed, watch the fuel gauge. A weight is lifting but slowly. You are free but there is much to do; all fourteen days are packed with the things you can’t do the remaining fifty weeks of the year. Weekends are a taunt: A blur of laundry and shopping and cleaning the house—of just sitting in the living room trying to decompress like a boxer between rounds. 

There’s the bell, put the mouth guard back in.

Names and lines on a map become three dimensional. You have driven far enough that the trees are different from where you live. Another Dollar Tree, another Dollar General. You stop for the night in a town but it’s not like the old days. All the motels are in the loneliest parts of towns where everything is beige and the sidewalks are like dares. Hungry? There’s a fast food chain. But you are determined, you walk down the sidewalks, daring the capricious traffic to cut you down. You find a local place. It claims to serve Mexican food but the only patrons are even whiter than you. You get a cheeseburger, it’s hard to fuck up a cheeseburger. You drink one beer and then another. You stare out the window at the traffic growling past. The weight is lifting. This is a life worth living, just drifting like a reed down a stream, highways and hotels. You vow to yourself to make the most of the two weeks; maybe you never understand this is just another chore to complete in fourteen days.

In the morning, you go down to the lobby for some cardboard coffee and whatever food there is: Some ancient sausages. Gravy. Indifferent biscuits. People walk into the dining room; a reality show you tune into mid scene. Lives intersect, but the cardboard coffee has yet to work its magic so you just stare out the window at the traffic growling past. You find yourself thinking about the remaining days off, all the plans….everything carefully planned out. It is a vacation…but it isn’t. You’ve spent the past months planning what you want to do, who you want to see. Are you really free or did they just put you in a much larger cage? No, you can’t think like that, you have two weeks. Well, twelve days now.

You stop outside a town you knew as a small child. The ocean is blue green then white as it rises in salutation to the sun. Your parents were building a house in the hills. While they worked it was just you and your imagination—could you have imagined this? A crow lands to peck at some discarded food. You watch it, wonder what its thinking. What is life like for him? It looks up at you, maybe wonders the same thing. There are no time for questions, you have a hundred fifty miles to cover that afternoon. Two weeks, every stop is planned out. The crow flies off, you drive on.

You are on a road like a lazy ribbon laid beside the sea. Ten or twenty miles pass and then speed limit signs throw out their demands: Another Dollar General, another Family Dollar, more fast food and hotel chains. Family motels and restaurants are few and far between—we live in a time of giants. But after three days you begin to feel alive again, outside the patterns of sleep work sleep work. Part of you tends to dwell the days are running out and soon you will be down to the last precious day of vacation, pushed to a corner of a plate to be saved like the last delicious morsel of an incredible meal, when your two weeks are over...