The winding roads were scattered with sneakily merging lanes and work-ahead signs. This would have set my head in a whirl if I weren't driving. We spotted sage, turquoise, and navy blue hues on our right, buoys floating like deranged bath toys in the distance. Parallel to the mountains, concrete walls with plastic holes enclosed the water. Is every body of water here artificial and a reservoir? It broke my heart. As I got closer, the colorful mixture formed a lackluster green. We landed at the power-generating and flood-controlling recreational site, beauty trialed. The feet encountered the slimy shore creatures, and murk gathered where there was no inflow and outflow—even the timid ripple was fake, denaturing. The algae, my visceral disgust, and curled toes were intensely real. We laid a cloth on the tiny crab corpses and brought a plushie from the car for a picnic. The world was our oyster. My eyes were sparkling.
The attempted cross-country trip was noir and fugitive, a final salute before leaving America: haystacks, abandoned farms and slaughterhouses, greasy diners, countryside rustics, fetishizable motels, and loner gas stations. Weeks before, I questioned whether anything that exists can make me sane and happy. Absolutes had become obstacles. There was the allure of each obstacle, taking resistance as a challenge, an excellent and seductive purpose. As long as I had love, the maggots under my soles and pyramid schemes trying to outwit me didn’t matter, as such happened before. I managed all well, blindfoldedly.
Elijah had to cut the trip short for his distressing reasons. I shut fast my shattered expectations because I was with my boyfriend, and my world was threaded with oxytocins and humid cuddles. We have been doing these trips for a year now. One crazy cloud was pouring as we drove to the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas from Dixon. The maintenance guy was feeding the hatchlings in the cage with a syringe. Colorful shovels were leaning against the wall of Buddha's monument. Elijah looked like a zen tai chi master. His eyelids were peaceful. I was trying to make sure he wasn’t a mouth-breather and that when he opened his eyes, he would look at me first, then the rest of the world.
We made it out of Missoula, a land of cute grazing creatures, friendly valleys, relic graphics, moose obsession, and elderly fantasies mixed with young blood. It was serene and idyllic. I could tell Elijah was happy, resting at his found leisurely pace, a rare blessing. In Missoula, we did what we liked best and absorbed the street life and culture by taking photos, posing, conversing as we emerged in and out of different scenes, driving around. When it rained, we were in bed writing music, mainly for the debut we had planned for me.
We headed to Sturgis. I wore turquoise pants, a white short-sleeve button-up, and British countryside flats. Radio on. Now– radio off. I stretched my legs and hips and walked around the car, channeling the energy of a classy nomad as if she earns a resilience badge for every change, severance, and heartache she so detrimentally seeks. As Elijah made a wide last-minute turn to leave the gas station, the police pounced on us and listed our tedious wrongdoings.
Elijah’s stash was lying with innocence in the glove box, which the cop’s flashlight spotted while we fumbled for the registration we had and the proof of insurance we didn’t have. The cop got his alleged probable cause to thoroughly search as we sat in his locked and barred cruiser with a dash camera. The silicon fist in Elijah’s sex toy duffle bag was useless in rebellion, nor could I hit the cop with it. Bohemian targets detected. The search was ceaseless. The ruthless alliance between cops and lawyers to mine out-of-state plates worked like clockwork that night, and all for a substance I don’t even touch because it makes me go cuckoo, so I rather stay in the wooden clock house. We were conjecturing about different scenarios in anxiety begging to be playful. I turned to Elijah and said, “I don’t think anything serious will happen. I just don’t want us to get separated.”
The cop found more remnants of Elijah’s weed nestled beside my prescribed Adderall bottle in my fancy Bongenie shoe bag. I was silent. Elijah’s explanation was a meek improvisation. I later realized that he doesn’t perform well under stress, like I do. “Oh, I have no idea.”, he stuttered, “…we must have forgotten about them.”Another pause. He managed a high-pitched try to assert, “Come on, man, we loaded this car weeks ago. We forgot what’s even in here.” Elijah could have kept resisting or being quiet, but he had no codes of self-preservation as he started to loosen up to the interrogation. He didn’t have to make any more remarks.
Our faces were growing pale. We remained silent on the ownership question—it turned out we had an unspoken loyalty rule of not ratting but perhaps a selfish guard to avoid the responsibilities of making a decision. When the body feels, thinking stops, and you lose sight of your rights. You better zip it. You better befriend the majestic fawn response. The substance was never intended to surface out of our SoCal car and enter the South Dakota air. Our excitement was reserved to see the motorcycle rally, indulge in the spectacle of redneck tattoos, cancerous skin textures, and the spirit of skepticism toward federal overreach; everything leather, suede, and buckled. Meanwhile, the other cop lurked behind the car, more shadow than man. He was the one to handcuff me from behind and hold me as Elijah and I kissed hurriedly and tearfully. He answered my questions about whether jail would be dark and cold, whether I would be alone.
“Once we cuff someone, we don’t uncuff,” came over as a cold slap to Elijah’s delayed self-sacrificial pleas. I ached to grasp what was happening. In the moment, it wasn’t mine to grasp.
“I’ll be out in the morning, right? Okay, I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, looking deep into Elijah. They blackmailed us by saying that if we didn't answer, they would get both of us. We gambled with our silence. Nobody had a soft spot for anybody, it seemed.
The acne-faced cop’s vain honorifics were torturing me with innocent illiteracy. He looked like a small-town jock thrown into the police academy. ”So, uh, do you guys have vehicles, like, cars... back home in Turkey?” he asked, driving to county jail. It would be more efficient to have magic carpets since Istanbul’s transport infrastructure is cramped, and although my home country is experiencing regression in every conceivable way, I was more concerned about my current situation. I answered which school I attended, which led to his next question, “Do you guys have sharks in Santa Monica?” For mere distraction, I couldn't stop my useless extraversion either, giving thoughtful and wholesome answers. It was like being in simple times, confirming simplicity like fire is hot, water is wet, and love is eternal while the machinery of bureaucracy was revving up to suck my soul. “Yes. One time, they had to cancel the field trip because of a shark attack,” I said.
The liminal entrance took me into initiation. Strip search, cough test and saliva swab done. Fingerprints logged. The clerk meticulously counted my bobby pins and cash, recording each amount and reading aloud the fortune from my Chinese cookie. Whether you choose fame or love, you can handle either or both. Property checked in. I got an institutional chic makeover down to my underwear. The formalities lasted for more than two hours. At some point, a wound cracked open with severe abandonment fear, “I have no family here! How would they know!” They didn’t find out until a couple of weeks after a premature settlement with an attorney. The clerk advised me to write down Elijah’s number and the bondman’s, which I kept inside the brown bra they gave me. Before all my property was confiscated, I dug my camera roll to find my SSN, and in the chaos of what felt like a black hole, I managed to reply to Elijah, “I love you,” “I’m okay.” I was shown to my cell at 2:00 a.m., where my cellmate Emma jumped in asking the time. I wore my navy jail sweatsuit unknowingly backward and doubled down as the jail ladies pointed at it, for I wanted a sense of rebellious autonomy. I pulled the coffin-like mattress off the top of the bunker bed to avoid the risk of falling. The worn blanket felt like Angora wool, and it did its job as I curled under the air conditioner. I asked the guardian lady if I could go to the common area, and she objected to the attempt. “Cells open at 6:00 a.m.,” I got the information. She locked me in the dehydrated piss-colored and piss-smelling cell.
The cell reminded me of my brother’s bedroom walls, though they were more of a summer lemonade shade that went along with the pop art curtains he had of 50s Hollywood stars. When I chose dark purple for my room, mom thought it was reflective of a child’s brewing darkness. It turned out that based on an article she read, yellow is, in fact, the suicidal color. True, I thought. Even if your dead body turns bluish-purple first, yellow lingers with its precarious balance between health and decline, an assertion of purgatory.
Color code #e1e114 is piss yellow. As so are the rest of its shades; based on your hydration level, you can pour out any shade of yellow. It was easy to hold for half a day and fast. I couldn’t eat the canned Dolce pineapples, the thick Goulash of something, the playdough pizza with suspicious toppings, or drink the limescale orange juice. I offered the jail ladies full trays of breakfast and lunch.
Emma was in because she violated her probation by skipping court for a felony of meth and gun possession. The rifle kept under the seat belonged to her late father. She got pulled over while on her way to discard a box of meth, a tangling souvenir from her ex-lover. Her 28-year-old psychologist daughter no longer talked to her. In what felt like a fastened 4-week summer camp, we talked a lot with words neither binding nor liberating and were released consecutively. She offered her number in case we wanted to camp out with her and her crew.
The static and fixed reality of the environment was punishing me by milliseconds. I was freaking out on having no idea how long these women had been here. My eyes scanned each woman as they made it in and out of their cells down to the clockless gray common area with reflective windows, a portal where information sculptors make the calls. During pill call, I wondered about their menu of medications, where immense gratitude for my medical purity came over (Adderall was auxiliary, and what a troublemaker it had been) – but wait, they must have been here for a long time that they have registered prescriptions.
The jail Boss was a half-toothless woman with a reconciled aura that seemed to make a home out of her imprisonment – like she had been running the joint for years. I wasn’t mousy when she called me out for taking her chair; instead, I was assessing the futility of territorial umbrage. If she had asked, I would have built her a castle of chairs for how much I needed something close to a motherly order, the least, a divisionary task. We were zoo animals, and I tried to visualize how I’d look if I were her, with no front teeth and half of my hair.
Then there was a butch softie with buzzed sides, a greasy ponytail, and sleeve tattoos of her sister’s and girlfriend’s names. Her energy was vibrant like Pippi Longstocking, telling things with buck teeth. And, the sobbing Venezuelan mother with three kids back home and no English. Emma and I were trying to communicate with her using the translation dictionary, hearing from the Boss that she had shanked her husband in a domestic blowout. Word was, he was just on the other side in the men’s wing, but when I figured out who he was, he was standing chained and mute in the jail library for our initial hearing, and I whispered to Emma. The guy was strutting flawlessly.
I felt the most sympathy for the woman that reminded me of Amanda Bynes, a sullen junkie with four DUIs, a vacant stare signaling that her wreckage no longer had drama, and a mark of misplaced innocence as a heart tattoo on her cheek. They were curious about me. I was, too. Amanda Bynes and I talked sat in front of the high-hanging TV playing a 90s supernatural rom-com. Then she showered. I glanced at her luminous face.
I buzzed in for the guardians multiple times, asking what was next, when it was my turn to fill out my initial hearing papers, how to make a call, and if there was anything else I might be missing. A man's voice crackled back over the intercom, saying it was too late; I should have gotten my phone card last night to make a call – all the while trying not to induce a heart arrhythmia condition in there with my hummingbird chest. I instantly started circling, trying to convince myself that Elijah would know exactly what to do. Just as we parted last night, nodding to reunite in the morning,
“You can make a call with my phone card.” Emma saved me, grabbing the piece of paper with the number.
Dialing, “Argh, out-of-state calls are more expensive,” she added. She had thirty-three minutes left, and it was thirty cents a second.
“Hurry up. What are you talking about over there? You’re supposed to give the bondman's number and hang up.”
I rushed my words and hung up as quickly as I could.
“Shit. I think we weren’t supposed to do that,” Emma muttered.
“Do what?”
“Me lending my card to you.” It didn’t matter.
After the call, Elijah arranged the bondsman. An older woman who reminded me of my late grandma handed me some papers—only then did I feel the momentum building toward my release. However, the scary fact remained that the judge had nearly denied me bail on account of having no communal ties to the state and, in his conclusion, to the country, too. Had I been denied, I would have found myself in the same position as the Venezuelan woman—just heading to a different place. Her bond was $5,000, mine a thousand, Emma’s a hundred. What no one knew— because no one cared— was how deeply I cherish that American water, grass, and spirit.
I had known not to get my hopes high languishing in impersonal settings. It’s hard to reconcile the shifting attitudes. Some now seem ambivalent or even inclined to favor illegal immigration from South America for a variety of reasons, while being a legal immigrant has become a hostile spectacle if you’re South Asian or Middle Eastern or whichever despised corner of the earth. The expectation is clear: you are to be a minion, not a dominion. I wasn’t entirely any of those but a drifter. A 23-year-old girl who spent eight years in what I called "education tourism."
The older woman returned. Oh god, how much I looked forward to seeing her snow-white curls. “Your guy keeps calling us over and over again, and he doesn’t listen. Sweetie, are you with him willingly?” I giggled, “Of course.”
Emma was called in before me. She walked out the door, triumphing as I was escorted out to dress back to my clothes. The clerk from Ventura, I guessed to be around my age, intervened as we waved and smiled at each other.
“Hey! Hey! Cut it off,” he yelled. He looked nerdy but was tough, and I hated him for having the authority.
“What are you doing here? Coming from California,” he mocked.
“Yeah, I know.” I didn’t know. That is exactly why I should be here?: I come from California.
“Go back there. Go enjoy the beach with your friends. I’m actually from Ventura. I want to go back soon. It’s so hot here.”
“Oh, funny. My best friend is from Ventura, and I often visit her.” While I was signing papers and gathering my belongings, our chat persisted, becoming perkier. As I was heading out, I waved at him like I had done to Emma, with enthusiasm and sparkling eyes. I almost wanted to hug him from the explosions of gratitude taking place in my heart.
I ate a big onionless burger and smiled. I must have been in shock, not comprehending what all of this meant. Some tap water went down my throat. We stayed another night in Sturgis to see a lawyer in the morning, which was abruptly arranged. Elijah had already booked a hotel room – a nicer one, a reward. I showered and stared into the mirror with dilated pupils, brushing my hair. I could hear him wrangling on the phone about his sublet issues, which now included a surprise baby and a baby mama. He showered after. We were clean and weary.
“I will never forgive myself. You weren’t supposed to go through this,” he said, drifting in and out of sleep. He jumped out to the sound coming from the corridors, the sound of an aggressive door knob, a skinwalker teasing at his regrets.
My subtle body movement rustled the bed sheets, echoing like ants climbing my eardrums. As I tightened my grasp, curling against his shoulder, I whispered it was alright, and the silence afterward hummed like a somber bee. I wanted to give him sanctuary, reassurance. You understand a singular being is meant to be alone once you complete a testament of independence, that the experience of life holds you dear as you have to behave a certain way behind bars and speak a certain way behind your lips. He had presence, yet I still felt the need to resolve. We were asleep before 5 p.m.
The next day was a whirlwind of tasks: the lawyer appointment, Elijah working at the cafe while I wandered the streets buying school-themed pins—an apple, a pencil— him babbling about work and art-related stress, I found the source to be excessive, then going to the bank and waiting for the car's alignment repair—all that before we hit the road for a three-day drive straight to Boston.
When we arrived at the hotel in Sturgis, unloading the car, Elijah was trying to compensate for something happening inside him by quarreling with some random dude at the front. The following day, he became suspicious that the guy he had spoken to, who had eyed us, traced his car to tamper with it, as we found the wheels out of alignment. I could tell his struggles were building up from the way he was squinting and licking his upper lip, muttering simultaneously. I asked, “You were scared it would end up on your record, right?” if he were ever to set aside his artist identity and get a regular job, start a money-making career. “You thought they would spare me because I’m not from here, right?” I knew the answers. How the hell did he drastically miss the mark? I was bitter, scratching the itch and judging how he could care about some random dude’s stare enough to lift his nose and snort like a pig at them. It is as easy to turn into a bitch as it is to suddenly turn into a pig. How couldn’t I defend myself?
Minnesota, Wisconsin. Under the sultry night sky, we stretched out on the coarse grass by the open road next to a hayfield with an army of flies and cicadas buzzing. We took turns driving. I convinced him to stay at a motel one of the nights. I supplied myself with shampoo, hair conditioner, and face moisturizer from Walmart because the trunk wouldn’t open. Illinois, Ohio. Pennsylvania. I took over the wheels in Buffalo. I remember peering over the trip memoir he was writing next seat, where he assessed the “fuckability” of the woman at the gas station counter. Amongst his other quirky notes, the keywords “fuck” and “woman” pulled me in, quietly lowering my mood. In the universality of hormones and desiring a customized gene lottery, I felt trapped. It got me thinking the entire time I was driving and that I, too, have a fuckability meter for myself. Mine wasn’t at the gas station.
New York, Massachusetts. I stayed with him for a month at his family house. Up until my family knew about what happened, I felt slightly like in an orphanage. Then the feelings of my position shifted to a maiden. We visited New York and Rhode Island in a limited time, deciding against Philadelphia. A week before September, we parted ways when I flew to Los Angeles, then left America. The feelings of my arrest lingered. It was the silliest thing. Yet with delayed resentment, I found myself back at square one, at the lackluster reservoir where beauty was trialed, briefing the depriving and draining bondage I off-guardedly chose by being with him since April. Although he was entertaining, it was like evil held me by the nape of my neck, threw me to trenches where I was whispered a scripture to entertain the idea of what we had and what we could have had.
Things could always be better or worse; we only say that to look at where we landed in an infinite of dots, and it’s neutral, natural, and so sweet. Yet I must admit how difficult it is to purge the past when you imagine vignettes of compensation to fill the void. I had faith in my purpose because he was in it, giving shape and depth to all I thought was meant for me.
…There’s sojourn, so joy, my love. What I wanted for us was to be Emperor and Empress of Chi energy, abundance agents, a transcendental union, oscillating strategically from metropolis to country, meeting in the middle of love to join forces and live debt-free kingdom style. We have taken the most damned and jammed sojourn of survivalism, soon ending mental slum. That’s all.
In Boston Airport, my whole body was trembling at the sight of him running back to his car. On the verge of fainting, I froze by the counters, a good amount for someone who should have been gone already, checking in her bags, notifying her parents that it is all over and that she is one step closer to seeing them. When I arrived at my friend Jordan’s house in Mount Washington, I discovered my phone had somehow fallen—and spent hours lying in the middle of the driveway. I returned, pocketed it without ceremony, and went inside to send Elijah a mirror selfie, then went to bed. I slept on my back in a frog pose like a Star of David as seen from the sky.
In my dream, Elijah wasn’t a faithful grasshopper. He wasn’t a defensive social climber nor a memetic juggler. In my dream, he didn’t give me a couple of decent nights and jester shows. He didn’t admire my “angelhood” as a subconscious confession of his evil. In my dream, he wasn’t scarce and bleak. He wasn’t an evidence orchestrator for the wrong causes. He wasn't denigrating me on a beautiful day at an oyster bar. In my dream, his looks were not so repulsive that they seemed to signal his soul was decomposing. In my dream, he didn’t exist.
