ALLISON THUNG
Road Trip
There is an inimitable kind of invincible you are at 19 making promises you cannot keep to friends you will not keep. Because hubris is not deception, and it’s not a lie if you believe it. And at 19, there is no reason to disbelieve the plans you make with Sarah and Ed over McDonald’s hashbrowns to road trip across California right after graduation, even though you paid with loose change in currency from a country 8,610 miles away. While Ed nods off in his seat from yet diagnosed narcolepsy, Sarah tells you how the best breakfast potatoes are always from diners attached to gas stations in the middle of nowhere, and you nod sagely as though you are in on the secret. For the rest of college, hashbrowns and gas stations alternate as shorthand for your grand plan, symbols of an unbreakable promise. But after 19 comes 20, and after 20, 21. And one day you are suddenly a 30-year-old liar, Sarah is a text message from 6 years ago you never responded to, and Ed is Edmund or maybe Edward again. And though you will meet other people, go other places, and have other adventures, every so often you will think about the time you never pulled up to the gas station-diner combination at which Sarah had the best breakfast potatoes of her life, only to discover the entire place had long been abandoned for ruin, and the only lights you thought you saw were from Sarah’s memories and your imagination.
First published in Unbroken Journal (July 2022 Issue)
Allison Thung is a poet and project manager from Singapore. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Emerge Literary Journal, Juniper, Brave Voices Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @poetrybyallison or at www.allisonthung.com.