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We drove today, windows down, windows gaping, windows dragging their jaws along the asphalt. We worshipped at Dunn's bright altar of the dashboard. There was music playing, music tumbling from the speakers, filling the car, filling the cupholders, filling the spaces in and between what we wished we could be and the sweet, simple reality. I thought as I gently guided the steering wheel into a sloping 100-degree turn, thought about how it's always going to be like that and how the air smells sweeter from my side of the car, the passenger side, or the driver side, away from the pungent gasp of the sea and its plankton.

The songs we played, the songs we sang, are the songs we heard and silently elected to be the soundtrack for a more important moment. We wished for a cinematic scope of events, the swooping crescendos and the rollicking, roiling second verse. When music and the moment collided and it all seemed more grandiose than the meditative way in which we caught our own reflections in the rear-view mirror and back again, blushing, surprised at our own naked expressions. And how we clothed ourselves then in the chorus, bleating the lyrics, swathing ourselves in distraction.

The things we wished for ourselves instead belonged to trees' leaves and clogged drains beneath our rubber tread as we threaded noiselessly through Tweedy's deep chrome canyons and even louder manhattens, wishing we were staring at each other, windows down, fingertips touching,

instead.