“We took the next exit, and with my GPS I tried to navigate my way back, trying to figure out how we could find the Georgia O’Keefe Museum. But the GPS wasn’t working well, and I was trying to figure out how, looking at the map, I could figure out where we were, and how we could get where we were going. There was a lot of traffic, and after days of empty highways, this came as a shock to our system. My mom and I began arguing, and it escalated until I was yelling about how the ‘GPS wasn’t working’ and my mom was yelling about ‘that geo thing’ and yelling at me to ‘look at the god damn map, maybe the map would have a better geo thing’ and then I was yelling at her about how it’s called ‘GPS and it stands for global positioning system and that the map didn’t have any’ until I began crying heavily, yelling about how I almost died and couldn’t take anymore. It grew very silent as I walled up into the side of the car and cried for about 5 minutes. Then, I gathered myself together, wiped my eyes, and directed us to the Georgia O’keefe museum. After that, my mom was very cautious of my emotions, at least for a few hours. The line had been crossed, the levee had been broken, the warning sirens went off, her baby had cried, and now she had to do damage control. We got into Sante Fe and parked, and went into the photography gallery next to the Georgia O’Keefe Museum that I had wanted to go into first. It automatically made me feel better, although I once again got teary eyed. Just looking at the beautiful photographs made me want to cry. I felt so inspired, but it may have just been some sort of girl hormone thing that was rushing through my system due to my recent emotional break down. We walked over to the Georgia O’Keefe museum, paid ten bucks, and wandered around. The art was lovely. She was a lovely artist. But in the third room, it hit me. It was 4 pm, and I hadn’t eaten a single meal all day. When entering into New Mexico, I found out there was pretty much just overpriced Mexican food, and I don’t like overpriced anything, or Mexican food. We went into a restaurant, one I didn’t even want to go into in the first place, and sat down. I looked at the menu and decided I didn’t want anything. My mom got very angry at me, and we eventually left after she paid 6 dollars for a beer. I chose the next place we went into, it was a lot less fancy, and dare I say a dirty gross Route 66 diner. I was expecting some cheap diner food, but no, it was basically the same menu. I didn’t want anything, again. My mom once again got mad, and ordered a taco to go. It cost her about 12 dollars to get one beer and one taco, and I still had no food. She was very angry, yelling at me about how ‘she had thought I had grown out of this, and I had never acted so childish since the time I was 12 years old and refused to eat at Denny’s. But I wasn’t crying, and I simply didn’t want to eat any of that food. I thought the real problem was not that I was a baby, but that my mom was babying me. Anyone else would simply accept that I didn’t want to eat Mexican food and allowed me to eat beef jerky and chex mex that I had inside the car. After pulling into the parking lot of 3 different places, and going into 2, I had a few hand fulls of chex mex, and that was that. That was at 11 am, so today didn’t start off too great in the first place.
I felt sick, I felt like I was going to pass out. I found my mom and told her I felt bad, and that I needed to get something to eat. We went into the gift shop to buy my grandma a post card, something we had done in every state. I pointed to one, and decided she would like it. “Are you sure?” my mom asked, “I don’t think she’ll like this one…” “No, I think she will. Let’s go.” so we bought it and left, in a desperate attempt to find food. A cafe with 20 dollars sandwiches, no thanks. Mexican food…nope. Finally, we found a bar with typical southwestern cuisine, and not for too much money. Your typical 10 dollar sandwich. I inhaled the food, and instantly felt better. We had collected ourselves. We were back on track. Next, it was time to find a motel. After wandering around downtown Sante Fe, most of the time spent lost in search of the parking garage while my mom went on about having to go to the bathroom. I told her to pop into some place and go but she told me it wasn’t ‘that kind of situation.’ I didn’t understand, because I frequently empty out my bowels in a grotesque manner in public restrooms. Don’t even get me started on things I’ve done in the south. After locating the car, we backtracked to where we had passed many cheap motels. It was here that I developed a technique to find the best hotel. It didn’t involve looking it up online and reading reviews, that took too long. It involved pulling into every motel, driving around their parking lot, and judging them. If it looked good, I went inside and asked for rates. If it was over 70 dollars, I told them we’d be back if we decided to take it. But we were definitely not going back. One motel quoted me a hundred and twenty five dollars… for a MOTEL. The next place got my certificate of approval for looks, and it was only 60. It ended up being good looking inside as well, as they had free continental breakfast. We slept well, and the next day we got up, we both had a banana nut muffin and a banana. We talked to the lady working there, who spoke about her girlfriend. What a strange place this was, coming from the bigoted ‘south’ (or what my mom describes as not the south, but the west…southwest… but Texas and Oklahoma seem like the south to me.) Everyone seemed so intelligent, so well put together here. It was nice.
I wandered into the parking lot at 7 A.M, the sun still hanging low with an orange cast. I watched birds, strange southwestern birds we didn’t have in Illinois. “Hey God, so this is weird. We haven’t spoken in a while, except for when I think I’m going to die. What an experience yesterday, huh? That was not fun. … Well….” I thought, I suppose praying, “this is weird. I’m gonna go hit the road now.” and off we went. I didn’t consider it a successful first chat with my new lord and savior. It felt very one sided to me, perhaps God is just the very silent type.
A few weeks later, I saw the postcard I picked out for my grandma. “Is that the postcard I picked out?” I asked my mom. “Yeah….” she replied.
“Looks like a vagina…””
