This was nothing new, this feeling. It had almost become like an old friend. The kind of friend that when you see them after years apart, they make you regret every life choice you have made since the last time you spoke, because they are clearly just so much more successful and stable and happy and look at that pity in their eyes, why was I ever born? It was like that kind of friend, that kind of feeling. I experienced it constantly, any time I allowed any level of negativity to seep into my mind. I'm sure everyone has felt it at one time or another, that innate desire to ride off into the sunset, never to look back. The suffocation of life's current circumstances, the realization that there is no air here any longer, the only possible way to breathe again is to go elsewhere.

This was nothing new, and yet, this time, something sparked in me. Everything looked similar, but the circumstances had realigned in a way that made just enough of a difference. Just enough of a difference for me to get in my car, take a deep breath, and leave.

Navigating the familiar streets of my home town, I experienced an eerie disconnect from the scenes that I had observed a million times before. Memories of running in to the grocery store in my pajamas or causing a minor spill at the gas station flooded my mind, but it was like I was watching a different person doing those things in a movie in my head, the world through a soft dreamlike lens. Feeling a bit unsettled by this reverse deja vu, I fixed my eyes on the road, always on the road.

Suddenly the ironically empowering sounds of Bonnie Tyler crooning “Holding Out For A Hero” filled the car, and peripherally I was aware that my phone was lighting up as it rang. But my eyes were on the road, always on the road.

It wasn't until after I had merged onto the highway that it occurred to me that the radio was off. Picking a CD out of my visor collection at random, I popped it into the player, if only to drown out the ever present ringing of my phone, Bonnie's constant pleas for a hero. I didn't need a hero anymore, after all; I was saving myself.

My eyes were so trained on the blurring yellow lines that I almost didn't notice my car's desperate pleas for gasoline, the little orange light blinking pitifully at me in vain. With a sudden jerk of the wheel, I was veering off onto the exit ramp, effectively pissing off every late night driver around me. To my knowledge, no real harm was caused, so I pushed the thought out of my mind as I pulled up to the gas station.

Climbing in and out of the car to operate the pump broke my reverie, making it harder to ignore the grumbling of my stomach. As soon as the tank was satisfied, I moved my car into a parking spot in front of the adjacent Waffle World and headed inside, grabbing my phone from the cup holder out of habit.

“I'll be right with you, honey,” the middle-age waitress called over to me as I slid into a booth. Unable to avoid the temptation, I flicked on my phone screen: thirty-seven missed calls. Yikes.

In an effort to calm my racing heart before I had the chance to start full-on hyperventilating and faint right there in the middle of Waffle World, in all likelihood causing a panic for the nice graveyard shift waitress, I cracked open a menu. Seven different choices of waffles, it's not like Amy is all that worried. Fifteen different sides, she would never call my mom or anything, right? Five flavors of omelette, it's all fine. Everything is okay.

“Is everything okay, sweetie?” Startled, I blinked up into the concerned face of the waitress, whose name, according to the faded name tag pinned to her apron, was Darlene. Because of course it was. Nobody ever meets a Darlene in programming concepts class, or at the shoe-store. But as soon as you stop in at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere, Darlenes suddenly crop up left and right. Meeting a Sarah or a Jennifer would be just plain weird.

Darlene cleared her throat, looking a bit uneasy at my prolonged silent eye contact. “Yeah, yeah, I'm fine, sorry,” I mumbled, feeling my face flush. “Could I just get some coffee and an order of bacon?”

I held my polite no-problem-over-here-no-sirree smile until Darlene was out of sight, then snatched up my phone. Amy had abandoned all hopes of me answering and changed tactics. Madison. Call me. Now. She had sent me the same exact text message, fourteen times.

Promptly after I set it down, my phone lit back up. Make that fifteen times.

I sighed, letting the calming darkness wash over me as I squeezed my eyes shut, flooding my senses. Amy only used my full name when she had had her fill of my shit, when she was completely and utterly done. Usually it was spoken icily, every syllable conveying exacerbation, except that last time. That last gentle “Madison”, the one that hurt most of all. That pitying “Madison” that showed just how done she really was.

Having harnessed my chi to its maximum potential, I opened my eyes to watch my phone light up four more times. Four more demands that I call her, nineteen in all. It wasn't until she strayed from the pattern that I picked up my phone and dialed her number, deleted from my directory but never from my heart. We all go a little Mad sometimes.

“Oh my god, Madison? Mad? Where the fuck are you?” her voice, all clipped tones stemming from anxious fury with just a touch of relief, drowned out the static background noises of Waffle World. I could just see her holding her hand over her heart, biting the corner of lips painted red as she waited for my answer. She was all that was real, she was my world, everything else faded just a bit more into nothing as I listened to that voice of hers.

She sighed dramatically in the silence that followed, well aware that I was in processing-mode but ever impatient. I could just feel it as she opened her mouth to express the end of her short fuse, when I cut her off. “I'm in the stars, Amy darling. Just look up and you'll find me, right where I've always been. Thank you, this looks lovely,” I said, smiling as Darlene set my plate down in front of me with a flourish.

I carefully picked up a piece of bacon, studying it in all of its rubbery glory before taking a bite. “Madison, I'm indoors. Stop being crazy and come home. I'm serious,” Amy was saying as I savored the greasiness, so much grease, so much grease that it must have been all of the grease that has ever existed in the world and probably even the universe. Does grease exist on other planets? Does bacon? I could not even begin to comprehend a world without bacon.

“Guess what I'm eating right this very second?” I asked, helping myself to another piece of heaven.

“Madison. Please.”

“I'm eating bacon. Remember how guilty you made me feel for my love and devotion to bacon? I'm eating it. Right now, as I say this, I'm chewing a mouth full of delicious, wonderful bacon. Remember how mad you used to get when I would chew with my mouth open? Well, I'm chewing right now, baby, and it feels good,” I said, nodding through my smile to Darlene in response to her mimed inquiry about refilling my coffee mug.

I added cream and idly stirred my coffee as I waited for Amy's response, envisioning her classic struggle to control her breathing on the other end. Maybe I couldn't make her happy anymore, but at least I could still make her blind with rage. At least I still had that.

“Mad, please. Just tell me that you're safe. You're scaring me,” she said finally, her voice small and quiet in a way that I couldn't recall ever hearing it before. There are so many sides to a person that you don't get to see until after you break up, after you're not supposed to collect information about them anymore, after they have rescinded your invitation from their slice of the universe. I had never known Amy to plead with anyone, but here she was, eight weeks after breaking my heart, pleading with me.

Taking a sip of coffee to ponder this, I swirled the sensation around in my mouth. What a beautiful horror, to hold the one you love's emotions in your hands. The one you lost. “I thought you'd never find me again. I thought you were done looking,” I said after an eternity of swallowing, swallowing all of my fears and regrets, leaving nothing but hope.

Silence filled my ear, and for once I couldn't imagine her expression. “Madison, I can't have this conversation with you. I just need to know that you're not going to hurt yourself. Please, come home. Come home to your family and your life, even if you can't come home to me.” Those were the words that refused to leave my head, like a verse from a song, even after I hung up and dropped my phone into the mug of coffee, watching the steam dissipate into nothing.

Darlene squeezed my hand in hers when she saw my tip, wishing me a good night as I headed back to my car, moving on from this particular corner of nowhere.

When I was thirteen years old, my mother pronounced me an official teenager and bestowed upon me my first ever cellphone. I treasured this device, cradling it in its sunshine yellow case, delicately pressing the buttons with reverence that acted as a magical long-distance tether to home. With a push of a button, my mother's voice would be filling my ear, which was a convenience that she used more often than seemed strictly necessary. In the midst of a savage round of kickball? Time out, everyone, my mom is calling. Crouched in the best super secret hide-and-seek spot ever? She just wants to remind me that my curfew is in two hours, like I'd ever forget, and somehow I'm the first to be found. This constant stream of cellular communication with my mother continued even after I'd moved into my freshman college dormitory, after I'd ditched that for my first apartment sophomore year, even when I let my lease lapse to move in with Amy. Now that I was a college graduate, living alone once more, my initial reaction to destroying my phone was a sense of panic. What if my mother needed to reach me?

That panic subsided into the greatest sense of freedom I had ever known. It was four in the morning, and I was on a road that stretched infinitely before me. I had no destination, leaving every path open to exploration. No one knew where I was, no one could reach me. I had slipped underground, where I could move invisibly and anonymously. The potential of elsewhere was as vast and unknowable as the universe itself.

Glancing at the stack of maps that I had yet to clean out of my passenger seat, breathing no longer seemed like second nature. I manually inhaled and exhaled with difficulty, feeling my fingers tighten around the steering wheel of their own accord. “Why would you ever use a GPS? Lewis and Clark didn't have satellites do the work for them. Finding your way is the best part of the journey,” Amy always said, lightly tracing our path in her atlas with a perfectly manicured finger. I loved painting her nails in deep jewel tones, experiencing fingernails vicariously and ignoring the fact that my own were chewed ragged.

“Bitch, please. Sacajawea did all the work. Plus didn't one die, and the other committed suicide? It sounds to me like they could have used a little help from some satellites,” I would respond, taking that beautiful hand and resting it on the center console, enjoying the way it fit so perfectly when entwined with my own.

Amy would giggle to herself; she always did enjoy my allegedly skewed accounts of history. “Shhhhh, just go to sleep,” she'd tell me, miming closing my eyes in the air with a wave of one of those immaculate hands. That soft laugh of hers haunted me, as if it was embedded in those maps. Amy was always able to center herself by pinpointing a minuscule spot in that web of roads, always confident that she was exactly where she was supposed to be. Without her to find my way, I was lost, floating aimlessly as if I was the ghost instead of the haunted.

Aside from the vague sense that I was in farm country, heading maybe probably west-ish, I just knew that I was a few hours closer to elsewhere. Rolling down my window two thirds of the way, I enjoyed the rush of 80mph air whirling around my head and drowning out my thoughts. When I matched the passenger's side window to my own, a few of Amy's maps fluttered out, never to be seen again. I had to swallow the impulse to reverse down the highway and retrieve them, restoring them to their proper place beside me. Maybe it was best to leave pieces of her ghost along the trail I was blazing. Maybe it was part of the journey.

I was so absorbed in this reverie that it took a moment for me to process the source of the pretty blue and red lights that were flashing behind me. Of course. Taking a deep breath, I pulled over to the shoulder of the road and rolled my window down the rest of the way.

A few minutes were spent in limbo while I waited for the officer to climb out of his vehicle, my hands folded neatly in my lap in what I hoped was a nonthreatening position. What type of posture is even appropriate when dealing with an officer of the law? Are policemen ever threatened by frail young women with malnourished looking skin and wispy blond hair? People like blonds, right? Blond is an innocent hair color, particularly when paired with my bony muscle-free body, so similar to a baby bird's. Unless he mistook my sharp elbows for weapons...

After taking his sweet time to saunter over, the young officer leaned casually down to peer through the open window. “How's it going, ma'am?” he asked, raising his thick black eyebrows at me.

“I'm doing perfectly well, thank you. How are you, sir?” I replied, refolding my hands and keeping my elbows to myself.

He glanced over at Amy's stack of maps, mirroring my habit. “I'm fine, thanks. Do you know why I pulled you over?” His eyes flicked back to mine, mocking me with their undetermined accusations.

“Actually, I have no idea. I thought the speed limit was 75.” This was the truth, but I registered nervousness in my voice. Face me with any type of authority, and I can't help but buckle. It's the pressure.

The officer straightened his stance, sizing me up. “It wasn't your speed. I saw you swerving in your lane,” he said finally. This wasn't any sort of question, just a flat statement.

There was a beat of silence as I waited for an inquiry that never came. “A few of my maps flew out the window, and it startled me. I'm sorry.” I laughed a bit, squeezing my elbows closer to my sides.

“I see. I'll let you off with a warning, but maybe keep your windows up next time, okay? It's late, and others might be swerving for different reasons, if you get my meaning. Keep yourself safe, now, you hear?” He tapped his hand on the windowsill twice in a friendly way, taking the edge out of his warning. Then he turned on his heel and walked out of my life as abruptly as he'd entered it. I hadn't even learned his name.

It was a struggle to catch my breath as I flipped on my blinker and pulled back onto the highway. Even though I could not have been more sober, I felt relief wash over me that he hadn't administered a breathalizer test. It would be just my luck to somehow get falsely thrown in what might as well be a third world prison, with the only phone number I had memorized belonging to a person who had discarded any obligation to help me. She had abandoned me in our home, the next logical step was clearly abandoning me in a jail cell somewhere west of Nowheresville, U.S.A.

I obediently rolled the windows all the way up, causing the air in my car to tangibly thicken with the silence. No music seemed like the appropriate soundtrack for what Amy would call my “descent into Madness”. At first this had been said with love, before it dripped with frustration. Neither of us were laughing anymore.

Doing my best to keep my eyes on the road, always on the road, I selected a folk mix Amy had made for me from the holder attached to my visor. The familiar notes wafted over me, taking me back to a place where I was happy. Everything had seemed so weightless back then, even though as it turned out, she was the only thing anchoring me down. I could hear a new twinge of darkness in each of these songs that I thought I knew by heart, accompanying me as I drifted away.

Dully I realized that the sun was beginning to peek out over the horizon. I had been driving for almost six hours. This thought barely registered as I reached over for the phone I no longer possessed to snap a picture for the girlfriend that no longer wanted me. Amy had adored sunrises, declaring it the most peaceful time of day. It was the time when the world reset itself, when everyone was free to start anew. This was a beautiful thought. Her every thought was a beautiful thought.

Approximately six hours away from me, back in my hometown in Illinois, I could imagine my family's alarm clocks blaring. My mother was guaranteed to be awake already; the woman never slept. She spent her days going a mile a minute, micromanaging the household and stressing over her five children. After utilizing every minute of the day to its fullest potential, during the night she breathed, putting what remained of her soul into her artwork. She was renowned for the erotic content of her paintings, said to be one of the great feminists of our time, but it was her photographic self-portraits that came to mind when I tried to picture my mother. The most embarrassed I have ever been was the time that one of her pieces somehow ended up being passed around my class in fifth grade. She was holding infant-me over her head Lion King style, both of us completely nude. Could anything be more humiliating to a ten year old?

This image was quickly replaced by a vision of my mother attempting to call my cell phone, hysteria ensuing when it was unable to connect. My poor mother, always struggling to keep her litter within reach, had finally lost sight of one of us completely. It was always bound to happen sometime. I guess it was always bound to be me.

The guilt was emotionally exhausting, but then again, maybe I was just exhausted in general. At the next exit, I spotted a seedy motel, the kind where you know at least three people have been murdered. At least. In all likelihood, a prostitute would be making a living in the room right next door. Then again, under other circumstances, that could be me. That could be anyone.

The man at the late night check-in counter let his hand linger as he handed me the room keys, running the fingers of his other hand through his greasy brown hair. I studied how the strands remained pushed back even after he had removed his hand almost as if he had gelled it, in an effort to avoid the extended eye contact he seemed determined to make.

Pulling back the stiff sheets, I climbed into the bed. I ignored the broken lock on the bathroom door, the missing drain in the bathtub. I ignored the way that the curtains wouldn't quite cover the window, a slit of light peeking through. I ignored the suspicious brown stain on the carpet. Shutting my eyes against what I could only hope was a semi-clean pillow, I drifted off to sleep with visions of sex-workers dancing in my head.

In the split second before my eyes snapped open, I was vaguely aware of my arms flailing about. Any time I had a fitful night's sleep, I awoke like this, spasming and gasping for air. Sitting up, I looked around in confusion before remembering where I was, and all of the circumstances that led me here. Sighing deeply, I glanced over at Amy's side of the bed out of habit. After all these mornings without her, it still felt strange to see it empty. How is it possible to feel so strongly that someone belongs in your galaxy, when they don't feel the same way?

Climbing into the shower, I briefly pulled the curtain shut behind me, but after a moment's consideration I threw it back to the side. If Creepy Motel Clerk was going to stab me Psycho-style, I wanted to see him coming. Under zero circumstances would I ever be cornered as a helpless victim. If someone comes at me, I'm going at them just as hard. Even if I'm in the nude with shampoo in my hair.

Subsequent to what turned out to be an uneventful shower, I towel-dried my hair and put on the clothes I had worn the day before. In my decisive get-the-hell-outta-Dodge state, I had neglected to prepare in any way for my impromptu adventure. A quick scan through my beat up canvas satchel revealed the sparse belongings that I currently had to my name. This primarily included a mass of crumpled receipts, as well as a charger for the cellphone that I had broken to mirror my broken heart. My wallet contained the debit card that my mother would no doubt use to track me down, but no cash. A pocketknife was easily accessible in the side pocket, weapon of choice for the paranoid. And, last but not least, a tube of chapstick. No sane person would spontaneously leave their life behind without taking precaution against chapped lips.

Squeezing my eyes shut and waving my hands in front of my face as the darkness enveloped me like a hug from an old familiar friend, I exhaled every last bit of air from my lungs. Chi officially harnessed, I perched on the edge of the blacklight's nightmare of a bed and blew my hair out of my face. Checkout was in ten minutes. That left me ten minutes to figure out what the hell I should do.

Without access to the banking app on my phone, I could only make a rough mental estimate of my finances. A combination of literary scholarships and subsidization from my paternal grandparents had allowed me to graduate college debt-free. This fact, combined with the way that I meticulously balanced my class schedule with multiple part-time jobs throughout all four years of school, had led to a rather hefty savings account. Sometimes a tendency of frugality quite literally pays off. Actually, I would argue that frugality always pays off, which was a viewpoint that led to frequent arguments with Amy. Of course, towards the end, all of my tendencies seemed to earn me the patented Amelia Bronson eye roll. I'll never understand how things veered so far off course.

I hesitated briefly before pushing open the door to the motel lobby, until I realized with relief that a cheerful-looking redhead was stationed behind the counter. Admittedly, it could be said that I harbored a thing for gingers. The first time I ever laid eyes on Amy in our shared freshman seminar, her naturally copper hair was piled into a sloppy bun on top of her head. She hadn't made the effort to fasten it properly, and it had started to lean to one side. God, she was beautiful as a redhead. She was also beautiful as a brunette. And a bleached blond. And with blue hair, and violet, and every other shade she had worn, that chameleon who could change her appearance so completely with just a bottle of dye. That chameleon whom I loved so fully, so irrevocably, even now. Always.

“Hey, are you okay?” I blinked rapidly as the clerk's concerned voice shattered my daze. “Um, I asked if you were ready to check out?” She bit her lip, twirling a strand of that mesmerizing hair around her finger, as if she was playing with fire.

Shaking these thoughts out of my mind, I smiled apologetically as I approached her counter. “Sorry, I spaced out for a moment there. Yeah, hopefully I'm not late or anything. My name is Madison Lam, like a baby sheep minus the B? I was in room 103,” I said, pulling my wallet out of my bag. I could almost feel my mother obsessively checking the records of my account, waiting for a new charge to shed some light on where I had gone, reading the same lines over and over again until they revealed why I would ever scare her like this.

The desk clerk nodded, typing my information into her computer. With her eyes averted, I had the opportunity to check out the name tag that was pinned to the emerald green shirt of her uniform, which personally I felt was a little baggier than seemed necessary. Hadley. Cute.

“Actually, you are about six minutes late,” Hadley told me, looking away from the computer screen to meet my eyes. It was impossible not to notice that hers were a near perfect match to the color of her uniform. As I struggled to come up with an appropriate response that wasn't some form of sobbing or cursing of the gods, she flashed me an adorably gap-toothed smile. “Don't worry, it'll be our little secret. I mean, it's before 11am somewhere, right?”

Relieved, I clasped my hands together in gratitude. Not that I couldn't afford a late checkout fee, but it wasn't yet clear how quickly my account would drain on this little escapade of mine. “Thank you, so much. Seriously. You, my dear, are a life saver,” I said, feeling extremely aware of my lack of deodorant and toothpaste this morning. I bit my lip in an effort to keep my mouth closed and spare us both the embarrassment.

If my morning breath was wafting all the way across the counter, Hadley gave no indication. “It's really no problem at all. Well, it looks like you don't have any additional fees. If I can just grab the room key from you, you are all clear to head on your merry way.” Our fingers touched briefly as I slid the key over to her, and I don't think I was imagining that the smile she gave me was more genuine than that of your standard customer service cyborg. Glancing over my shoulder one last time while I walked away, I battled the urge to compare this redhead, who was a mere blip of an anecdote in my life's story, to the one who encapsulated the entire book.

Feeling rejuvenated after the morning's session of light flirting, I unlocked my car and slid behind the wheel, hardly giving Amy's maps a second glance. Okay, it is entirely possible that I gave them a second glance, and maybe a third as well. But they didn't make me want to drive straight into a tree, which seemed like a vast improvement over my usual mental state.

As I was reaching to switch the gearshift into drive, I realized that I had no idea where I was even headed. After some momentary deliberation, though, my destination became clear. There had to be a pharmacy or something in Wherever the Hell I Was, Iowa, regardless of how small the town seemed. This wasn't suburban Illinois, but it wasn't colonial times either, even if the fields stretching out in every direction indicated otherwise.

Choosing a direction purely based on intuition, I started slowly down the road of the agricultural metropolis I had landed in, keeping my eyes peeled for any type of relevant store. Amy may have been melodramatic to call our society's dependance on cellphones and access to wifi dangerous, but it sure could be inconvenient. I couldn't begin to comprehend how people found any establishment at all before the ability to look it up on the internet was widely available.

After what seemed like years of aimless driving, I abruptly jerked the wheel to pull into the parking lot of an independent grocery store. Wandering the aisles, I tossed all necessary hygienic products into the yellow plastic basket, before heading over to peruse for sandwich fixings. It was becoming apparent that no matter how hard they tried, a few slices of bacon simply could not sustain a growing girl for long.

When Amy and I had travelled together, she always insisted that fast food joints were a crucial element of the full experience, despite her adamant vegetarianism. Without paying entirely too much to essentially poison her body with french fries and soda, it couldn't be considered a true adventure. I shook my head in an echo of the reaction I had back then, every single time we hashed out the same exact argument. She was wasteful, I was a killjoy. I guess I had finally killed too much of her joy, she needed to cut her losses and preserve what was left.

Left to my own devices, I climbed into the backseat of my sedan, piling my grocery bags onto the bench seat beside me. Locating the plastic cooler I had dubbed a worthwhile investment, I dumped in the small bag of ice and added all of my perishables. That priority out of the way, I made myself a turkey sandwich with provolone cheese and apple slices. Sure, per unit it cost less than the average burger and fries meal with the added bonus of being fucking delicious, but any level of practicality just yanks the fun right out of the eating experience. Right.

As my gourmet meal began to digest, I put my favorite mix into the CD player without allowing the necessary allotment of time to talk myself out of it. Reclining the driver's seat as far back as it would go, I shut my eyes and let those first familiar notes work their magic and soothe my wretched soul. Maybe I could live without a nap in a grocery store parking lot, but since I was so at a loss of what to do now that I had all the time in the world, a little recharging seemed like a decent place to start. In the first of what Amy had called the soundtrack to our devoted journey, Katie Herzig and Matthew Perryman Jones crooned what I had always thought of as our own personal lullaby. But this time, I was falling asleep alone. “Here we are wandering, aimlessly roaming, lovers who linger and never forget. And when it's done, we'll walk where the road meets the sun...”