Like a Best Friend | ✓

chapter seventeen

After a photo stop at Forrest Gump Point, a long stretch of Utah highway with Monument Valley in the background, we switch out the van for a jeep for a Navajo guided tour through the valley followed by a much needed lunch at Goulding's Stagecoach Dining Room. Two bad nights of sleep are catching up with me and I can barely keep my eyes open even when I'm trying to take in the astounding views of the buttes and the mesas and chimneys and spires and all of the other amazing things that our guide, Kai, told us about as he drove us through the valley.

By two thirty, when we get back into the van with full stomachs for our final drive of the day – a big one, almost two hundred miles from here at the very bottom of Utah to the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona – I am flagging big time. Kitty's the opposite, reenergized by a good meal and invigorated by the views and I feel bad to be a party pooper but I've reached that stage of tiredness where I feel sick and I don't want to ruin my first impression of the Grand Canyon when it's the part of the trip I've been looking forward to the most.

"Hey, sorry to be a downer but I'm gonna take a nap," I say to Kitty as I roll up my sweater to cushion my head against the window. Leila's sitting up front next to Dylan, in charge of the playlist for the next three hours.

"Sure, of course," Kitty says. "Did you sleep badly?"

"Yeah, pretty shitty night. Didn't get to sleep until about one and then I woke up before five and I am feeling it."

Kitty winces and says, "Did I keep you up?"

"No, no, not at all. Just, you know, my brain. Too busy for its own good," I say, swirling my hand around by my temple as though to indicate my overactive thoughts. Kitty's eyebrows pull together momentarily and I can see the question in her eyes: what are you overthinking? But she doesn't ask it and before she can, I say, "I never sleep well in new places." True. I struggle to truly switch off when I'm not in my own bed. But last night's restlessness had nothing to do with being away from home and everything to do with Kitty. Just not in the way she thinks.

I put in my earphones and queue up my favorites playlist, a mix of Taylor Swift and Harry Styles and girl in red and Lizzy McAlpine and Olivia Rodrigo. I close my eyes to the tune of Late Night Talking, hoping to at least get a half hour of sleep, and I let the rattle of the van shake every thought out of my head. Maybe the jolt of my head against the window will knock my crush right out of my mind.

*

It doesn't.

By some miracle I manage to sleep for almost all of the drive and when I open my eyes and see Kitty in front of me, her head against the window and her curls bouncing, my heart drops like I'm on a roller coaster. I dreamed about her. I don't often remember my dreams, which are usually too wild and fantastical to hold onto for longer than the first few seconds out of sleep, but I remember this dream. It was normal. A life of domesticity with my wife.

I could cry.

"We're staying in Grand Canyon Village," Dylan says, "but we're not going to head straight to the hotel because we're about forty minutes away and sunset is in"—he checks the time on the dash—"fifteen minutes. I don't want you guys to miss out on that, so we're going to take a break at Desert View Watchtower, which is just coming up on our right. It's further east, so it's less crowded and a totally unique spot with a way better view of the Colorado River."

The colors of the day are already turning, a rich mix of orange and pink imbuing the sky when we park up in a surprisingly quiet lot, only a handful of other cars here.

"Hey," Kitty says quietly, catching me once we're out of the van. "Feeling any better?"

"Much," I lie. The overtired nausea has gone, but my traitorous dreams have filled my head with the vision of a life with Kitty. Dreams don't deserve to be so powerful, showing me what I now know I want the most in painfully vivid detail and snatching it from me the moment consciousness returns. And now when I look at her, I see the life I invented.