We’re projected at seventy miles an hour down the interstate by forces we can barely imagine. He looks over from his rigid driving position, nervously glancing at me, asking if he should turn down the a/c. Asks if I’m cold.

So many times its making me uncomfortable. I sit back, my sketchbook clutched protectively in my lap and I watch the sky whip by. So much sky. So much unpolluted blue sky its almost obscene.

Its almost hypnotizing. The thought of a wide open unknown. Empty space. Land bare of corporations and strip malls. Just a solitary abandoned house from the pioneer days in the middle of a sea of nothing. Like a gravestone. Silence. I wonder what it must have been like…to live in the depths of an unknown land, and all that silence. Pure, sweet silence.

“What are you thinking about?” He asks.

“Nothing,” I respond.

“You have to be thinking of something.”

“What if nothing is something?” I ask.

“Like silence?”

“Exactly,” I say, and turn up the music.