Jasika Nicole

That's what it's like.

I am seeing the real landscape, and I am seeing this highway.

Not flashing back and forth, not superimposed, but like a vivid image of the mind on top of the world my eyes see.

This is wondrous and it is wrong.

There is something so wrong about this that I have to breathe very slowly to stop myself from vomiting the hamburger from that dead bar onto the grey dirt.

It's like the two landscapes are struggling against each other.

It's like one of them will someday win and the other one will collapse.

Here is what the woman, whoever she was, wanted me to see.

This impossible simultaneous America.

A highway that is and isn't.

Don't tell Alice, they said.

And I am glad I hadn't.

I'm glad she isn't confronting the same terrible impossibility that I am.

I get in the car.

There was never any question as to what I was going to do next.

My body was just waiting for my brain to catch up to the decision.

I start the car.

I turn it toward the simultaneous landscape.

And carefully, I switch my conception of which one is real.

Now the grey dirt and the weeds are what I am imagining and the highway by the river is real.