In Which You and I Get Stuck in a Gas Station For as Long as We Want

Theodore Santanilla

Think about the drive to Nacogdoches, Texas. After the Toledo Bend Reservoir, maybe near San Augustine. This is not a place that exists, so the details of geography need not be specific. On the way to CR - 2093, if that helps. Specifically, you’re driving to a large yellow farmhouse with a picturesque red barn, complete with a water slide carved out of a rock formation. Well of course, you’re not driving there, I am. But, to understand it, you have to be there with me. I can say we're driving there, so you feel less alone. It’s a lonely memory. We’re in a 2019 Jeep Grand Cherokee that my dad bought before they were everywhere. It’s important that you know this because it’s important to my dad that everyone knows this. 

We’re headed to a Texas-A&M mini reunion—just my dad and his buddies—in the grand scheme of it all, but more immediately we’re headed to a place that’s not so much unstuck in time, à la Vonnegut, but more so exists outside of it entirely. You see, this place that we’re about to be isn’t real. I go there all the time, and I’m also not sure I’ve ever been. One second, I’ll come back to that thought, you’ll just have to see. Right now, we’re in the front seat. Black leather and a really efficient A/C system. We look out the windows to a yellow-green vibrancy. Some warm brown dust kicked up by passing cars hazes everything a bit. The sky looks like it’s been chlorinated. The trees are green to the point of glowing from the sun. We’re in the East Texas Pineywoods. I don’t know if that helps. We pass various types of fencing. Livestock fencing with thick wooden posts driven into the dry ground separates us from horses and grazing cattle. Steel corral fences close off long private driveways. Variations of picket fences frame new construction ranch houses, while variations of low chain link fences bar off abandoned brick storefronts and lawns that look like junkyards. 

Okay, here it comes. Past this sad-looking tire store with the crumbling concrete foundation and the peeling billboard. See that gas station up ahead out the window? Yeah, look over my dad’s head. That's our next stop. Just you and I. This is where we split off from my family. No, we’re not getting gas or going to the bathroom. The car won’t stop. We’ll just be there. The next moment has happened before and will happen again and again forever. This version of us, in the still moment right before the next moment which is full of movement, collapses and folds in on itself, becoming the single densest speck of matter right up until the point at which we cease to be in this car by blinking out of existence and back into a different existence. Technically, we are all the same except for a miniscule passing of time, but every time this changes me somehow. It’s like I, or the atoms or electrons or quarks, get rearranged in a slightly different way each time. The particles that used to be pumping blood through my heart now make up the neurons firing this memory. And this time you too. Welcome. 

It just happens. Like we teleported to a desolate gas station. The air is still, because there’s none at all. We don’t really have bodies, yet at the same time we’re in green camping chairs with pralines in hand, watching the cars pass by on the other side of this parking lot. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s just how it is. Concrete, not asphalt. There aren’t gas pumps, just these platforms where they used to be. A little elevated concrete slab with a pockmark where the gas used to be drawn up out of the reservoir. And we’re just here until it ends. The memory doesn’t extend further. It’s like I'm trying to make it to Nacogdoches, but in order to do so I can’t start with the car ride. I have to pull into the gravel drive, then I can feel the air again, once I step out of the car. Only then I can feel the chill on my skin from the A/C dissipate. Those memories move forward, but we can stay here until you want to go. It never repeats, I never have to rewind, I never have to move on. 

This isn’t instructional. I don’t know how it happened, or how to do it again. I don’t know why this doesn't happen with the Nashville airport, my childhood home’s back porch, or the game room in a Gatlinburg cabin. I have so few answers and so few ways to make it worth your time. Just sit there with the praline melting into your not-there hand. Look at the grass growing in the gas station cracks. Leave whenever you want, and just start driving to Texas to come back. 

Theodore Santanilla is a senior at The Willow School in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is currently completing his Certificate of Arts in creative writing. He has won multiple Scholastic Writing Awards, and he is one of just 50 semi-finalists for the National Student Poets Program. He prefers to write lyric essays, prose poetry, and vignettes. He is also the head of layout and design for The Willow School's literary magazine, street.