I was frustrated for the first part of the drive. I’d missed the turn onto Depot Street and winded up taking some backwoods route to get onto the highway – backwoods for Ann Arbor, anyway. I lost a solid 20 minutes for one stupid mistake, and the street design didn’t make turning around any better than just pushing forward.
20 minutes gone, and I was already running late. Not for any particular event, admittedly, but I knew that every minute counted with these weekend visits, so losing 20 hurt.
The frustration must’ve exhausted me, because I was zoned out when I heard the pop.
***
“Then midway through, one car’s tire just popped,” I told Maddie.
“In front of you?” she asked.
“It was like… in front of me, but like not right in front of me, it was a few lanes to the right, but I saw it. It was like a-it was like a… it was like a truck’s trailer, I think it was like the trailer it was dragging.”
We were lying on her bed. It was somehow 5:45 already. I’d left at 3:00 and arrived at 5:30. The drive from Ann Arbor to Grand Rapids is just about two hours. I lost 20 minutes after missing my turn, then another 10 somewhere in the drive. Perhaps the scene with the tire had prompted me to drive with more caution than usual.
“I just was kinda zoning out when it happened, so it was kinda ‘Oh, what if that happened to me?’” I continued. “I’m always paranoid about just like… my tire going flat or something… ‘cause I never even think about my tires, except for, well, I am thinking about them in that I’m worried they’re going to blow up, but… that’s like the worst time to think about them.”
I’ve been driving the same 2007 Ford Escape since the car passed into my possession my junior year of high school. In all that time it rarely gave me any trouble. A window got stuck half rolled down in the middle of the winter once, and the a/c had never worked right, but that’s about as bad as it got. Once, back in high school, the dashboard flashed a “Low Tire-Pressure” warning at me for a few weeks, but I just told my parents and they took care of it. That’s the extent of my past tire issues.
But there’s a part of me that I’d describe as superstitious, a part that doesn’t believe in chance, that sees signs in the seemingly random events that unfold exactly how they do when they do. It’s a part of me that goes against my otherwise logical outlook on life, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t play a significant role in how I interpret the things that happen in my life. After witnessing the pop of the truck trailer’s tire, that part of me knew I was due for something to happen.
“When I worked at Michael’s, some kid was late because his tire just fell off,” Maddie said.
I laughed. “Shit!” I said in the mock voice of the surprised Michael’s employee suddenly bereft of his tire.
“His whole wheel fell off.”
“He was not even like… so it’s not there to spin, at all, it’s just–” I descended into laughter before I could finish my thought.
“Yeah,” Maddie said, understanding me nevertheless. We both laughed at the thought of such an utter calamity.
We were lying down in Maddie’s new room of our old apartment. She and her sister had signed the lease with the understanding that I’d be living there for the summer. Part of that agreement was that Maddie would have to move out of the big room come the fall into the smaller room. We hadn’t much use for that room when it was just the two of us, leaving it for storage. It was where we put things that had no immediate use – a small TV that had no place beside the massive one my parent’s had gifted us, a coffee maker that broke during the move-in, drawers of makeup and paint products that I wouldn’t know what to do with. Now that room was where we’d spend most of our time together – and with that it’d become my favorite room in the apartment.
We’d been terribly fortunate to have the summer how we did. I had a remote internship with a Midwestern literary journal and worked a tolerable job at the Barnes and Noble Café – as tolerable as such a job can be, at least. Maddie worked at a local art museum and took classes, on top of releasing an EP and having a booth at the Ann Arbor Art Fair. The rest of the time was ours to spend together – perfecting a sweet and sour chicken recipe ripped from the internet, catching up on past seasons of Fargo, going to concerts and house shows, smoking weed, playing video games, making love, and making each other laugh.
It was, in a word, ideal.
And leaving it behind for the fall semester felt like doing a cannonball into concrete.
This particular weekend was only the second weekend after classes started. I knew from the three years of our long-distance relationship that it was much easier to see each other in the fall, when the drive between Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor wasn’t hazardous, so we had to make every free weekend count, along with every hour that such a short time provided. We’d grown skilled at making the most of our time, leaving for home at the last possible moment, deciding which plans can be canceled and which must be attended to – all to buy us more time.
Except we’re both busy people, with full schedules and obligations in our respective cities. Seeing each other beyond the few days open weekends allowed was impossible. Whenever we did part, it wasn’t us saying goodbye so much as it was the universe forcing us apart for reasons we simultaneously understood and resented.
I’d like to say I’ve come to peace with this situation after being at it for so long, but the truth is that it’s only gotten harder with each passing year, and spending the entire summer together made things exponentially worse. That second weekend after classes started was the first opportunity I had to get down there, and I took it.
***
I came to Grand Rapids on Thursday, with plans to leave Sunday afternoon in order to make it back for a club meeting that night. However, when the time came for me to go, I messaged the head of my committee and let her know that wasn’t going to make the meeting. I considered giving some excuse, but decided that something as small as a committee meeting didn’t warrant one – better to save my excuses for when I’d need them. That bought us a few more hours. I even considered staying overnight, since my first class Monday wasn’t until 1:00, but I knew I had to drag myself away at some point. It’d be easier to do it that night and get through the readjustment period – those awful few hours immediately after we parted ways – overnight, rather than have to put up with it the next morning.
7:00 came around in what felt like no time at all, and with it I was obliged to take my leave. We held one of our signature too-long goodbyes in the parking lot, where we both carefully peel away from each other – like removing the label from a bottle, trying not to pull too hard and leave scraps of ourselves scarred onto the other. Maddie went back inside and I stepped into my car. A good drive was what I needed then, to clear my head, prepare me for the week, and help me get over having to leave.
After starting the car, I was met with a strange but not unfamiliar sight. The words “Low Tire-Pressure” stared at me from the dashboard interface. I thought back to when I saw this warning last, when it amounted to nothing and proved little more than a pesky annoyance on my drive to school. I also remembered the truck trailer’s tire going ‘pop’.
I stepped out of the car and inspected the tires, giving each a firm press to check their solidity. I walked around the car counter-clockwise. The front left tire appeared fine, the back two as well, but the front right tire looked droopy. That’s what I thought at first, but my initial reaction underestimated the damage: the tire was flat.
***
I’d later learn that the tire went flat from running over a screw. The head of the screw was just a nub on the top of the tire, its body driven as deep as it could get into the tire’s rubber. The guy who helped us at the Discount Tire the next day explained how such an inexplicable occurrence may have happened: a car in front of me ran over the screw – which was lying in the road for one of hundreds of possible reasons – sending it tumbling, and my tire came into contact with it at the exact right moment for the sharp end of the screw to pierce it – easy enough to do with the speed and force of a moving car.
Easy enough, but it still takes quite a bit of bad luck for everything to come together exactly so. I had to wonder what the cosmos saw fit to punish me for.
After this lecture and a thorough inspection of the tires, the guy at the Discount Tire suggested we get a whole new set. The warranty on the car’s current set was four years, and I’d been using them for seven. We agreed and let them get to work.
I was with my mother, who’d driven up that morning after getting a frantic phone call from me the night before. We got breakfast at Denny’s while we waited for the tires to get installed. After two hours, the job was done. I said goodbye to my mother and sped back to Ann Arbor.
***
Before all that, after I’d called my mom and we decided she’d drive down the next morning, I called Maddie. I told her about what happened. She came downstairs to get the door for me and we went back upstairs.
I was more than happy to put the stress of the situation ahead of me. In fact, I wasn’t even upset about it at that point. If anything, I was lucky. As I’d learn at the Discount Tire, those tires were years past their warranty. I hadn’t had a problem with them all the time I’d driven the car, but knew that a problem had to come up sometime. I saw the tire of that truck’s trailer explode just yards ahead of my own car. I thought of the Michael’s employee on the side of the road with his entire wheel having fallen off, about all the people I’ve ever seen stranded on the side of the road, emergency lights blinking. This could have happened to me on a quick run to Meijer, or on the trip to Grand Rapids, or on the way back to Ann Arbor, be it this trip or the next one or the one after that. Instead it happened – or at least made it’s happening apparent – in the parking lot of our old apartment, where Maddie still lived and where I had come to visit, where I wouldn’t have to flash my emergencies, where we could take our time and just fix the problem.
The superstitious part of me couldn’t help but feel that things had worked out pretty well.
With the few hours we hadn’t planned to have, we went to Meijer, drank wine from a box, watched The Deuce, and made each other laugh.
When we parted the next day – my mother and I off to Discount Tire while Maddie stayed home to get started on the work that’d been neglected over the weekend – it was quicker than the usual slow-peel. Just a hug, a kiss, an “I love you,” maybe a “Drive safe,” and it didn’t hurt so bad this time.
Behind the Writing:
“The prompt for this piece was very particular about the process we were meant to follow: record 10-20 minutes of dialogue, unscripted, and transcribe it, then find where in that conversation was ‘the turn,’ the moment of substantial significance. The conversation I recorded was between me and my girlfriend, the first time we’d seen each other in a couple weeks. It was mostly indistinct banter, full of quirks and anecdotes that wouldn’t bear much meaning to an outsider looking in. Needless to say, this was a challenging piece to find any sort of ‘turn’ in. Regardless, I gave it my best, and am happy with the outcome, for the most part. I hope you enjoy it.”
Writer To Writer Literary Journal 