Original - Freewrite (On Highway 33)
There's something about the lonely stretch of 33 that always tugs at my throat. Maybe it's that point that the coffee starts to really hit me; an almost dry feeling at the back of my tongue and the top of my throat. The road reaches west and north, but ultimately makes me think "go west young man, go west".

There's nothing young about this stretch of road. The farms that hug the curves of the road are older than the pavement. I remember someone told me once that the reason there aren't straight roads in the Midwest was due to farmers being too proud to sell their land. The result was that the government had to pave around them. Of course, my father could have been the one to tell me that, so it may very well be false.

I drive for a living and have seen about every highway that Ohio has to offer, but 33 always gets me. It rolls up to 30 and then you hit US 31 and can ride the road into South Bend, right along the road to Notre Dame. I never felt a great affinity for the college. The idiocy of having to drive up to Michigan (admittedly not a long way) to get back to Indiana to go home always irked me. All because of a game.

Back to 33. I always feel sad when I see the businesses that dot the landscape along the farmlands. It's like the land itself gave up and went bad. Farms failed and turned into banks or fast food restaurants that failed and turned into small car lots or rental companies that ended up abandoned with "thanks for the memories" in falling letters. Nothing young. Nothing old. Just given up.

I always start to think about the first funeral. Everyone has a first funeral. The first time a friend died. I was fifteen when my ex-boyfriend committed suicide. He'd first broken up with me, about a week before that. He used a shotgun. I have no idea, to this day, why his mother insisted upon an open casket, his misshapen face still bothers me over ten years later. We had accumulated a group of friends that just drifted after his death.

One of those friends called me a few years back. I can't even remember the conversation, I think I responded with a "how did you get this number?" it was hardly friendly on my part. We'd met for an awkward lunch and probably both had each other's numbers deleted before we pulled into our parents driveways.

It isn't that I'm hiding from people, really. My biological father hasn't tried to make contact in years, that side of the family sometimes presses against my life, along the edges, but they never get under. Old friends aren't bad people. I just don't have anything to say and I feel like they deserve more than false pleasantries from someone who hasn't thought too much about them.

Strange things to think about, alone on a road.