Experimental Writing: An Exquisite Corpse Style Record of my Cross-Country Road Trip
When I set off on what became my 12,000+ mile, 2.5 month cross-country road trip, I also set out to document it in a number of ways. Daily blog posts and plenty of photos, and also an experimental writing project I outlined on Day 1:
Each day I’ll share… the next sentence of an extemporized, ongoing creative writing experiment that will turn into some sort of exquisite corpse style story by the end of this trip.
(Creative Writing Rules: One sentence per day only, and I’m not allowed to look at the sentence from the day before when writing that day’s sentence.)
I’m still reflecting on this trip, even as the day-to-day reality of it fades from immediate, visceral memory the way intense travel experiences do. I didn’t edit anything. Only chose where to put paragraph breaks. And I followed my own rules and didn’t read back over any previous day’s sentence before writing the next day’s.
So here’s my surrealist-inspired writing summary of the journey, one sentence for each nomadic day.
I’m quite pleasantly surprised at how it captures the feeling of the trip, and I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.
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The wind howled loud enough to drown out the incessant drip of the tap, the hum of a fridge long past the days of its youth, and the susurrus of passing cars. If ever there was a time to curl up cozily into a snug den, Here, she thought, it was. The knots tied in her shoulders by cold, foggy mystery untangled in a rush of steam. It was hard to keep her eyes open, coffee or no, but keeping her eyes open was the only responsible way forward in a world full of blinders.
Hope came to her from odd corners by unlooked for roads.
Wracked by unseasonable shivers, she wondered how much barbecue one person could eat. It was time to loosen her grip on always knowing, to be led by her whims and to trust what they might bring. She thinks she’ll maybe just keep heading West towards the sun and lingering light until she finds some mystical answers, but in the meantime she keeps listening. It was a time for reflecting on deep wrongs and the height of rights that were needed to counter them; rights whose roots were taking to their new soil and starting to turn toward the sky.
Her eyes went bleary and the droning hum of moving onward stayed in her ears and her brain. There was something in her that was made easy, like the animal of her heart knowing it was safe to venture out of its den. To be swallowed up and immersed, but only up to her waist, felt fine and enjoyable all right, despite her longing for something a bit more… comprehensive. Her head felt filled with cotton, filled with static, filled with all the choices that came piling through when the door in her mind was opened just a crack. It was time to make a body-led decision, and she made it. Awe was gritty in her mouth, gritty and present and real. It was nice to be quiet, internally soft in her mind, as well as eased in body.
She pressed pause on her solitude.
The sun bleached her of her energy, siphoning little molecules of attention out of her pores, but oh, the drowsy haze felt sweet. The sun made her brain fuzzy, and the company, her heart. It felt good to be known by people who’d known her so long and as so many sequential versions of herself.
She slept roughly, used her dirt-strewn hands to get it done, and smiled at her inner solo self. The loneliness of artifice and independence and accomplishment was present, in all its terrifying and tender glory. She was fully caught up in the evocative swirl of mysterious faded glory around her. This was the exemplar of holding multitudes: joyful discovery and droning anxiety and culture nerdery all in one.
There was a whole nest of thoughts and feelings stewing in her brain that needed some care and attending to.
It was good to feel true to herself, where and how she was meant to be. What a contradictory thing her heart could be.
It seemed a very site specific day, appreciating art and relaxation and surprise celebrity encounters. She was finding clarity in new places, but even more, she was finding new ways to find clarity. The return to burning expensive fuel to cover distance instead of traffic was welcome.
Serendipity and serenity at once weren’t things she’d ever imagined going together quite this seamlessly. Her pleasures were shared with many, and that didn’t lessen them one bit. Slowing it down when she needed it bore fascinating fruit. Leaning into the “out of control” feeling was proving fruitful. The things that had made her worry took a welcome break, and she noted it and celebrated.
The radio must have been listening as along came California, California, and California (There Is No End to Love), along with “The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.” It felt good to be in a world apart that could also be shared, full of associations that were individual and views that were communal.
Sometimes the best way she knew to enjoy her adventures was to make those adventures small and quiet. When she stopped trying to control it all, everything around her felt like a present. As she wandered through the space, she felt refilled and also tired, sharp and also fuzzy-headed, familiar and also surprised. The variety and creativity and intelligence of people in the world should stay in her mind, not least for staving off dystopian gloom.
Unglamorous realities and anxieties and physical drags piled up on top of her adventures and pilgrimages and new sights seen. She was warmed on a deep, fundamental level, to be reminded that amid stress and uncertainty, her internal work was externally visible. She didn’t take the toughest, self-sufficiency-above-all-else route, and instead chose kindly for her body.
What would it take for her to have these layers of holistic satisfaction in the best form of truthful compromise she could muster? She reminded herself that part of positive overwhelm is allowing the time and space to come back down to just whelm.
She felt scoured and sun-tight, tired with satisfying experience, and eager for some rest. She started reflecting on goodbyes, even as some exciting hello’s beckoned her on. She felt completely reoriented and at sea compared to what had once been her norm. The routines she loved seemed so easily disrupted, but for such worthy reasons. How she could even fit so many simultaneous feelings inside her was something of a miracle itself.
The reflective headspace was creeping up on her in the way it did, motivating who knows what next creative plan. The particular delight in a truly magical bit of serendipity sent her to sleep feeling warm, physically and emotionally.
The definition of the thing felt apt: A vitally important or decisive state of things; the point of culmination; a turning-point; the point at which a change must come, either for the better or the worse, or from one state of things to another: a crisis.
She settled into bed to drift off with a smile in her heart. It was perhaps time for a rest, and yet the ending of an adventure is always sad to contemplate. What a jumble of experiences had been mosaic’ed into her brain, and how much life she’d had so vibrantly.
