Digression
by Sue Lange
[ fiction - may 08 ]
One day when I was driving in a red convertible with the top down, I got off 78 to use the restroom at an unknown exit. Having completed the task at hand, I returned to my convertible, pulled into the intersection, and waited for the light to turn green before I could proceed to the entrance of the highway and resume my travel home.
While waiting at the light, I looked around, taking in the countryside surrounding the cloverleaf of this unknown exit. There was a brown convertible also with the top down, also waiting at the light, right next to me. When the man driving the brown convertible caught my eye, he winked at me.
I smiled and for a short moment considered not getting on the highway. I thought that maybe instead I would follow the, I must say, not bad-looking stranger, into his life and thereby changing my own which had heretofore been carefully designed, constructed, and clung to by me because it was what I liked.
My possible future flashed before my eyes. Flashed, I say, because I had no idea what it would be like and so there wasn't much to see. But the mystery enthralled me.
With a faint rebuke at myself for being so rigid, I did the expected and returned to the highway and my carefully constructed life. I did not digress. I did not transgress.
Only once have I wondered what life with the not bad-looking stranger in the brown convertible would have been like. I must have been in a reflective mood or something. Perhaps it was my birthday or maybe January 1. Doesn't matter. The point is, I was in one of those frames of mind where you wonder. I wound up taking a long walk and eventually found myself in the bar in my neighborhood. I ordered a beer and sat for quite some time, watching the not bad-looking strangers as they winked and drank to stave off the loneliness.
