Dating : At 7.

At 7:00 am in San Diego, cars are already viral on the I-5 South, heading towards downtown. My knees are leaning against the dashboard, head easily positioned in a way I can look up through the window above us. My older sister sleeps in the back seat, mouth wide open with hair strands getting caught on her dry lips. Looking up, I have a view of the smudged stain my she had made while trying to release car mirror to apply her lipstick a couple months back, but that’s the only pigment in view. In the early morning, San Diego resides in grey, clouds merging into a seamless cover. Maybe, I spot a sliver of a tall tree hovering over the side of the freeway, dry, dying leaves in a muted green. The road is long and flat, and I sit up to watch our tires bleed black against it. As I would do when younger, I instinctually try to count the number of dots we pass, searching for some kind of pattern or rhythm in our movement. We drive in my dad’s old Mercedes Benz, which my mom and I would refer to as the “boat.” It is clunky, but effective in eating the white dotted lines that we pass on our drive. These are the same observations that I make every morning when we go to school, but today is the last morning of the year. My older sister is graduating high school in a week, and I start my junior year in a couple of months. This is the last time we will all be in a car together, my mom in her old sweater, hair wet from a shower, my sister and I matching in our Episcopalian college prep school uniforms. When we get off the freeway and head towards the ocean, the seamless cover of clouds unravels at a point on the top of the hill, and we drive towards it.