Interstate Memories: Shadows, Traces, and the Hunger for Time

Echoes, Absence, and What Remains

Interstate 65 is black and endless, semis roaring through the December night like hulking metal ghosts. Headlights carve narrow tunnels of light into the dark—drivers fueled by gas-station coffee, trucker speed, or whatever pills JT’s Gas sells off Exit 151. The road stretches flat and unyielding. The road hums with a kind of aimless purpose, relentless, grinding forward, dragging me south toward northern Kentucky’s hills—those smoky, bluegrass-covered ridges I haven’t seen in years.

Earlier, I stopped at the Cracker Barrel off Southport Boulevard—chicken and dumplings. Peas boiled into submission. Across the street, the Hampton Inn, where I used to crash when driving these highways for less legitimate reasons. In the restaurant, I played the triangular golf tee game, hopping colored pegs until the board declared me a dummy. I laughed to myself because, of course, I already knew.

Ahead, six hours of silence lie between me and Chattanooga. The dark presses in. No phone calls, no directions to strangers’ smoke-filled living rooms, no whispered exchanges over coffee tables with powdered lines and potato chip crumbs. Just me and the road, the occasional rattle of the car door when I veer into the grooves in the asphalt—the ones that yell, “Stay Awake, or Stay Alive, or Stay Inside the Lines.”

Photo credit: Marico Fayre

Stay Inside the Lines

When I was thirteen, my stepfather took me backpacking in the little hollow of Elk’s Cove on Mount Hood. “Leave no trace,” he said, as I opened a can of smoked mussels, stabbed at them with a plastic fork. It’s a wilderness rule, meant to protect fragile ecosystems, but it felt bigger than that—an ethos, a demand for invisibility. I followed him across glacier-fed streams, waded waist-deep in icy water until my legs shook, climbed slopes until the landscape shrunk to a picture postcard. Yet there’s only one photo from that trip: me in an Earth Day T-shirt and my favorite red hat, grinning like I belonged to the Cascades.

But the real memories are unrecorded. They’re in the snowballs that stung like frozen fists, food hung from pine branches to keep safe from bears, the nights we slept under stars so bright they felt sharp enough to cut the night. Waking to the chilly morning with pine needles pressed into my cheeks and the silence broken by the hum of mosquitoes and the crisp scent of frost. Back then, it was enough just to live it. I didn’t need proof.

Now, I cling to all the traces that remain: photographs tucked into drawers, voicemails I can’t delete, handwritten notes smudged and yellowed. For every piece I hold, I think about the ones I don’t have: those from before March 14, 2000, when my brother was still alive—standing at the kitchen stove in golden-hour light, laughing. The sound of his voice calling my name, clear and warm. The way his hands moved when he spoke, weaving a story in gesture, full of energy and intent.

Memories should be enough, but they seldom are. I want to press play on his life in these moments when I miss him—to hold relics in my hands, as if they won’t ever break.

“Leave no trace,” my stepfather said, and I obeyed. But the truth is, I want the traces. The evidence. The proof that my brother existed, that he mattered. That I wasn’t the only one watching as he walked this earth. Because the memories? They fade. But maybe the fragments we keep are enough to hold onto the rest.

Photo credit: Marico Fayre

The Missing Frames

The Cranberries’ Zombie is screaming through the speakers now. Dolores O’Riordan’s voice, jagged and raw, cracks open something in my chest as she asks, “What’s in your head?” Details of loved ones departed come in flashes. Just now, it’s the detail of my brother’s Doc Martens—creased and worn, seams and folds like his feet had grown into them—the black laces swapped for red. Back then, I didn’t understand the symbolism, but now, too many years past his death to count, I wonder if it meant he was brim-full of hate.

“Another mother’s breakin’ heart is taking over,” Dolores sings, and I hear the question beneath her voice: What’s in your head?

I hear this song and I’m sixteen again, standing in our yellow living room with its beige sectional and mismatched tables—the stackable Sony stereo turned up loud enough to rattle the windows. My brother, a shadow in the corner, is polishing his boots, the air around him pulsing with something I didn’t yet have the language to name.

And I was just his adoring sibling, seven years younger, watching his every move like it held some secret, some hidden door that might grant me access to everything I ever wanted. But there was always something more lurking. The complexity of mental illness. The light of love shone through addiction. Or sibling adoration.

I hated when he went into my room, rifling through my CDs, taking what he wanted. But when I came home from school that day, finally with the courage to rage and walking in after slamming the front door, he popped his head into the living room, startled, the stereo blasting The Cranberries, Linger and said, “Dude, you scared me,” while turning the volume down and grinning. “I was just listening to your CD and making you a snack. Want some chicken fajitas?”

And just like that, he disarmed me, turning my anger into something softer before it could even take shape. “You like The Cranberries?” I asked, skeptical.

“I love this album,” he said emphatically, and for a moment, we were the same.

Traces and Circles

Tonight, the Louisville Slugger sign glows above the city skyline like it did when I first saw it, a flicker of recognition against the unfamiliar. I press the gas harder, trying to outrun the memory of the bat, the boots, the man who died from hate.

The bat was my first, a kid-sized silver one with a rubber grip and the word “Slugger” stamped into the side like a promise. I used to march through the house with it slung over my shoulder like a soldier’s bayonet, pretending it carried me somewhere far from our small, crowded home.

By fifth grade, I was “Rocket Arm,” the short-stop with the cannon throw. But then the bat disappeared, and I didn’t think much about it until the news broke about an Ethiopian man beaten to death by three skinheads down the street. I never asked my brother where it went.

They say X marks the spot, but I feel more like a circle—motion without destination, endlessly looping back to the same questions. What’s in your head? What’s in mine?

The Hunger for Time

The need to capture it all feels louder every year, like time is speeding up and memory alone isn’t enough to keep pace. I think about the flash—the grooves in the asphalt shaking me awake. The gleam of the yellow living room. The camera capturing my face in the middle of nowhere, frozen against a cascade of mountains.

I wonder if I’ll ever let go of the need to collect everything, or if I even want to. Maybe the point isn’t to hoard time but to hold it, just for a second, before letting it slip through my fingers.

Photo credit: Marico Fayre

Strength in Motion

This journey—epic, some might say—is less about the road and more about the questions. Am I leaving something behind, or moving toward something new? Can the act of driving, of moving forward, be enough to change me?

I hold tightly to the steering wheel as the tires grip the road. Somewhere ahead, the hills rise, and the dark shifts to something lighter. I don’t know where this drive will take me, but the hum of the engine and the pull of the road remind me: I am motion. I am strength. I am enough.