mem or ee

the fall is for brooding, open highways, and the ghosts of the ever lingering lovers so far gone the memory cant recall, cant conjure them on command, like the known sign no longer visible in his for reflecting rearview mirror. beyond the hills infront, just like those heinous empty nebraska plains, recently passed through, what exists i can not know or remember only imagine. i sat on my front bumper at an all too familiar gas station - as he had so many times been - between my past and the unpossessed future. only the past is mine.
'how can you do that - walk backwards through life?'
he, or i, the subjects - life or story? the direction you view, i look, everything is twisted fact or fiction, twisted and ravelled and ravelling around each other, around themselves. 'theres nothing back there for you,'  he thinks she is disgusted, she hides it well, but i could see it, coiling behind the veil of her eyes.
in his head or out loud i say, 'theres nothing back there at all.'
'what?'
'things imply substance, and theres not, theres no past beyond the stories and the corner crouching ghosts,' she has been sick of this, is and was, and will be even later when they, we, have stopped talking. i know she isnt here, thats just a memastory, this is just the haunt, the milemarker. 357 where the light swung left to right no matter which direction one faces, for the light was always just remembered even when he was living in it. i thought it looked like silent blonde streamers, fragile and resolved.
white washed blue eyes and her fingers at his wrist, checking for his resting pulse. 'i cant feel it' from beneaht the shest she says, '.....
he remembered it as a confused sleepy wandering question, childish but then i remembered it differently something about the sound of the highway- maybe more a mocking tone. and it all seems to blur, the bedroom or a gas station in limon, colorado. was it her voice or the old mans that mocked me like pearl mocked dimsdale, 'thou wast not bold, thou wast not....'
it was a carved grey beard and the frayed cowboy hat then he recalled asking him
'where you headed?'
and before i could answer he rambled on about some place in texas, about a job or a girl or whatever it is spectres on the great american highway always find themselves crawling towards. the old man was headed some where, for there was nothing the old man told him, for him or i or he or them in this place. there was and is nothing ever here, something is always elsewhere, over there beyond the ridge, beyond the hills, the horizon until there are no more horizons - for that is what death is, the end of horizons. and living the movement through the nothings of this place, ever real, and not, he or i thought, to be confused with the nothings of the past which were not even real, to the place where one no longer look into, and through what was not towards what might be.
i think i grunted, i am sure i didn't speak.
'what about you? you headed home?' the old man couldnt have seen my licence plate.
i said no, or i dont know, or 'i dont know where home is'
most places are like most other places, from the over hang of a gas station florida isnt much different from east colorado, or alabama from virgina. go to enough places, see enough of the spectrum and the gaps between the majesty of st marks and the mundanity of your average road side diner falls away, or into itself, a place is everyplace, is no place. and like all the memories of summer days become one day of bright summer, or one bar of golden light so do all places become a, or any, gas station.
and too the voices and the people and the old man and the girl are there, saying in both voices, unique and uniform, choral and monotone the words, the question
'... where is your heart?'