Chicago

I recently visited Chicago to see a bunch of bands I like. Due to my unhealthy obsession with Sufjan Stevens, the city had a certain loveliness that was more than the architecture and polite Midwestern attitudes of the people who lived there. It was a lovely vacation.
On the ride back, however, I had a break down. Jeremey and I drove there, and it was a 13 hour drive. On the way back we stopped in Metropolis, IL ("Hometown of Superman!") so the ride was a bit longer, and we sort of improvised directions.
We were on a road called Highway 52, I think, and it was dark. The road was not so much a highway--just two lanes running through some country towns in North Georgia. The highway took us up a mountain, along a twisted road--it seemed almost gratuitously twisted. I wondered what they were trying to prove by making so many goddamned twists in this road. It seemed like it would save a hell of a lot of time and pavement just making a straight road up and down this mountain. Anyway, the thing was, I thought I was dead. I was on this goddamned mountain so long that I thought I had died, and I had gone to hell, and I would do nothing but navigate this horrible, twisted road, with Jeremey next to me, completely silent, forever--waiting to hit some crossroads that we never would. I felt like I was going insane.
There was something about that fucking road. Jeremey and I were completely silent the whole time, though there was so much we could have said. It felt like hours we were up there, though I'm sure it couldn't have been more than half an hour. When we finally hit a normal road I pulled to the side of the road and started crying like I hadn't in a long while. I can't even explain the way that road made me feel, and I suppose I would prefer not to even try. I just felt so trapped.
I have a sudden, sincere sympathy for the insane.

I suppose I am very much a city girl.