Iris

    I don't feel anything but a soft, cool air wafting at my neck, arms and legs which dangle from the edge of my seat, not quite touching the floor but slightly tickled as the fibers reached up and touched my toes. I felt like I was floating just bellow the surface of some great ocean, moving slowly with the waves. An unparalleled calm thick in the car. Mom is driving, dressed comfortably with hair pulled back into a neat ponytail. Head and eyes locked straight onto the navy to cobalt blue, violet to strawberry-red horizon. Bobbing with the dips and lurches of the 7-seater van in that thousand-yard-stare kind of way. But she was not alone. My father, wrapped in blankets and seat tilted back slightly, was in the passenger seat looking out the passenger side window. I thought he was asleep for some time, but saw his searching gaze through the side mirror. His large eyes tired half-moons hanging in the thick shade of this early morning. Thinking about it now, I wonder if it is at all significant that I describe his gaze in such a way. Or why such a look was mirrored and refracted in varying angles as every other waking soul in that old child-proofed van had their own window they were looking out of with blank yet slightly inquisitive ( or was it worried? ) expressions on the front of their heads which proved to be signs of quiet activity in the back of them. Only my sweet, innocent little brother was asleep, head sweeping and swaying. Soft, painless dreams hidden under all his long curly hair, and trapped behind thin eye lids and palm-frond-thick, feather-long lashes. Grey t-shirt crinkled behind stern restraint of the seat belt on which his head rested toward the left arm rest. His blue osh-kosh basketball shorts hiked up his legs disclosing play-time boo-boo's and bruises. To my left, my aunt and her roommate ( basically my aunt though blood does not bind us ) looked out in their own directions, existing silently. Opposite my younger brother, my older brother, nestled up to the right arm rest of the back seat and partially obscured by this old telescope we'd always enjoyed playing with together, he sat quietly with legs curled tightly under his hips and hand propped under his chin, looking out his own side window in blissful silence. The whole of us as a family looking about like stop-frames of the same clock at different times in it's endless cycles... His socks and shoes were kicked off in lazy fashion, strewn about the foot area in the back. He was wearing this old baseball t-shirt that he and I both liked because our father wore it around most times when he got off-days or played outside with us. We still have that shirt, large enough then that it still fits us now. Only difference now is that I was handed down my father's while my brother was handed the extra. 

    If I had to throw out every article of clothing I own save that which is on my back, I'd without passing a single thought trash everything but this special, $5 dollar, tattered white baseball tee and some shorts. 

    I remember that after scanning my surroundings, I turned my head toward my own side window and over the hum of engine and rubber to road, Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls playing softly on the radio, and gaped at the grand painter's-pallet sky splayed out in the distance. 

    I was so inexplicably content.