The amber in the road
Do you know that I love North Ave?
I do.
I love her.
She’s one of my favorite things about Atlanta.
The A has a sort of checkered history with her street names.
It’s mostly due to racism and the segregation era.
One name stands in the more affluent parts of town
but then the name changes when it crosses into—
“different areas of influence.”
(That’s the polite southern way to say, “white people don’t live there.”)
But ol’ North doesn’t do that.
In fact, I think she’s about the only street I can name that runs from the east to the west side and doesn’t change.
She’s the self-made woman of the A.
I don’t feel like her.
No—
Sometimes I just feel like the beautiful amber goblets that M gave me.
But not all of them.
The one that came broken, in the box.
Like I’m just a million beautiful pieces of shining gold shattered in the noisy folds of brown packing paper.
Maybe not even good enough for stained glass.
When I look backward from the place I am now (after the boy, after it all)—
I can’t exactly pinpoint where it all went sideways.
Where feeling love got lost.
I can close my eyes,
but I can’t see the spot where the 4-wheeler hit the rain gully
and flipped
and pinned Hay and me in the red clay.
It’s a fuzzy feeling.
Connected to sadness, but also apathy.
Hard.
Like a Snickers bar from the freezer—sweetly inedible.
The same ingredients with an icy interior.
Golden shards that can’t hold anything anymore.
I bet North Ave had days like that though—
Back when she was just a dirt road, laden with horse shit, when the city burned.
Back when the street names really did separate us all.
Or when the city poorly budgeted tax dollars and didn’t pave her for a while.
“Cheap, bastards,” I bet she’d say.
But she’s still here,
runnin’ past the Varsity,
What’ll ya have?
From Bankhead to Midtown to the Old 4th Ward,
she kept on.
Maybe that’s all the answer is sometimes.
Maybe you just—
keep on till it takes.