As we drove from Missouri back to Alabama, I almost said, "If I see one more Trail of Tears sign, I'm going to fucking cry."
But I didn't.
Most would take it as some sort of humorous hyperbole, and I suppose in most ways it kind of is. I mean, look around at this white girl, okay, life. I am tired and stressed, but it's not biblical levels. Every twenty minutes Tennessee itself seems determined to remind me of that.
The signs aren't subtle. TRAIL OF TEARS. Another one. Then another. Little roadside reminders that something happened here bad enough we've nailing explanations to the roadside two hundred years later.
And here I am, irritated at Google Maps.
The soapbox I could try to stand on is barely wide enough for one foot, and it's a little rotten. Not rotten like the floorboards of a shack without insulation, rotten from the weather coming in, but rotten like a child spoiled rotten. Actually spoiled. Horribly spoiled.
That's what I'm standing on.
But nonetheless, just like Stormi Kardashian wiping her brow, flustered, trying to move frappuccinos out the tiny, luxurious drive-thru window of her playhouse Starbucks, I am tired and worn out. I am wrung out.
And so are you. We are lost on back roads, and yet again, we pass another Trail of Tears sign.
Not the same sign, but another marker. Another place where someone thought it important to stop and say: this happened here. Right here. Along these roads and ridges and stretches of Tennessee.
Then Google Maps instructed us to continue for half a mile.
My threshold dwindles into despair as you announce you need to pee. Thank goodness, me too.
Another Trail of Tears sign.
So we stop at "Country Girls Rest Stop," where an Indian woman (from India, not Trail of Tears) sells us mozzarella sticks and chicken sandwiches and a scratch-off ticket (we won nothing) after we have used some of the dirtiest bathrooms I've been in for at least two years. I left a bloody pair of panties in the trash can, and it's okay. It's part of the fun and the journey. I was just hangry. You too.
We eat and split a Reese's Cup and continue on. For the next five miles, you sporadically announce, "It's okay," and I follow with, "Yeah, we're okay."
And eventually, we are led to a main stretch of highway, which we will stay on for forty-three miles and cross the city limits into what we still call home, for now.
A miracle at last: I didn't cry once.
