unsentimental, driving around
A car on the open road. America. Driving around til the ground meets the horizon. I didn’t think of that, somebody else did, Sally Mann or David Wojnarowicz.
A car on the open road. America. It’s California’s wine country. The dashboard reads 100 degrees. I have never seen anything read 100 degrees before. So hot we’re crawling along with the doors open. Scorched vines either side of us and the roads are winding. Doing panic napkin maths. If we run out of petrol now, it’s three miles to the nearest petrol station. Three miles would take an hour to walk. We have a third of a thin plastic water bottle left. There are four of us. Who would we send out and who waits in the car? The dash reads 100 degrees and it isn’t a good deal for anyone. We haven’t even got one bar of petrol. We’ve turned the AC off, the radio off, and at a slight hill, we put the car in neutral. Black rental car, volcanic to the touch, rolling where we let it. Two kids in the back and I’m one of them. You’re the other. Our seatbelts rub so we’ve taken them off and swing our legs out the side, the ground passing grey beneath them. Way back from the road stand big old buildings, chateau-style, with dirt tracks winding up to them. Up front, there’s a debate about cruising up to one of those instead of the elusive gas station that might be shut, especially since the last one was and that’s how we got into this whole mess in the first place. I didn’t know a petrol station could be independent and sell rotting tomatoes in wooden boxes before this trip. I didn’t know a family of four could be scared by metal fences and dogs chained up and barking in country backroads. We slept in a treehouse. We slept in a cold wellness retreat in chilly Mendocino. You and I were the only kids there. We ran across the dunes. We got bored in Olympia. I didn’t know a thing about Nirvana but I found an old copy of The Great Gatsby in the bookshelf there and rolled oats in the cupboards. We ate porridge the texture of grits and stole the book with its dark blue cover.
My favourite books as a child came over from America and were in a series of like 100. I used to blitz one a night. I’m not sure how old I was supposed to be. Every night, these four kids, and maybe their dog, would find themselves playing house in a new location in America. First a boxcar, then an old cabin, a crumbling hotel, a chateau planted well back from the road. They’d fashion jars into cups, the girls cooking on the old stove and the boys finding wood for fires. Alongside having to live, these kids who I’m not sure ever aged, would also have to solve a mystery.
Later I’d be in a foreign kitchen in the city I’d grown up in, drinking wine out of jam jars with somebody I thought I was in love with and gazing out the window onto the street below as we talked. He said after reading On the Road he threw out all the cups he owned and started drinking from jam jars. I couldn’t get along with On the Road because there weren’t enough women in it, but still, I liked to live in strange places, drink wine out of mugs, put a phone torch under a glass and dim the lights to make student mood lighting, and I couldn’t think why. I also liked long run-on sentences and metaphors that threw in modern detritus like texaco and lexapro.
Maybe one of these On the Road tendencies came from a surplus of Boxcar Children Mysteries and having been on holiday too often as a child.
England, again, and I haven’t been in a car in ages but the temperature here has hit the American hundred. Big skies when you find a London park that gasps relief. Planes dribbling all over it, and shoots of white and pink and blue all coming together. I’m with an American. I’ve been with him before. He lays down on his tummy and I do too. I roll over. He plays me his favourite song and tells me not to say anything when I listen to it, so I shut my eyes and concentrate. It’s a surf edit of a Pixies song. I handle it with the solemn tenderness of a teenager. I have lived this scene a hundred times and I just want to try it out one more time to see if it ends any differently. The friends that know I’m seeing him again are furious with me. It isn’t too bad. I haven’t been in love yet and I wonder if feeling like a teenager once more — bored and hot and comfortable and serious and easy and laughing — is what love is. He’s the only one so far to make me feel like this. I roll away from him and place my head back on the papery grass. Let him talk.
(I know talk of London isn’t what you signed up for — open road, 15 years old, AMERICA, seatbelt rash fading, folding the cd liner notes out in your hands — but if you’re going to play my brother you may as well play my witness too.)
Nobody goes anywhere in London (the open road is a circle), so we have to do road-trip talk in Peckham Rye park or Telegraph Hill park or London fields or down by a canal, thudding the tow-path. Anywhere where the sky expands, suddenly. I’m not talking about that one holiday we went on but I should be. The American wants to escape to the mountains and live alone with a dog, even though when he tried to read On the Road he didn’t finish it. Despite being The American I forget to ask him if he ever read The Boxcar Children. I’ve never felt this comfortable in a lover or former lover’s company, but all his fantasies seem to involve leaving everyone behind, including me. It dawns on me that we are not backseat teenagers; we’re driving the car that has run out of petrol and soon one of us will have to get out and walk.
His big issue with dating was the fact that a large part of it involved playing house before you ever even fell in love. Especially when fucking was involved. I said, If you can’t play house then, when can you ever? He was mad, I guess, about how sex and drinking coffee out of mismatched mugs always ended up going together. I suppose he was mad about the fact that after the evening comes a morning. And with morning and — horror — breakfast, comes soft domesticity.
The playing house never bothered me — my whole life is pretending to live somewhere. In a heart, in a house, in a car after watching the solstice. I had a feeling that if you pretended enough, one day it might all fall into place.
The American didn’t agree.
I get home past midnight which is always when I get home, walking through the blue park with abandoned Lime bikes that rise like neon cicadas out of the dark.
Izzie Glover (@fizzieflover) is a writer and poet from South London. Their work has been published in The Mays 29, Gobjaw and is set to appear in Intricacy. In June 2026 they were longlisted for the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize. They have just finished writing their first novel, a work of lyrical fiction.