Drive Home

Four and a half hours is a long time. That’s how long it takes me to drive home. I’m not the kind of person who likes being alone in just everyday life, so not seeing or talking to anyone for nearly five hours…is not my idea of fun.

The familiar roads rise and fall, twist and lean in the same way that they did one and two and nearly three years ago. Me and my ridiculous memory know where every billboard stands. I told Claudia once to wait until we reached the top of a hill because I knew precisely what billboard lived there.

I study ever stretch of road, every car’s driver’s whim, and every twisted tree that stretches to the clean blue sky, every patch of flowers that bravely grow uninhibited. Every hour or so I will see a sight that awakens in me this yearning to paint what I am seeing, but I know I cannot, and the beauty quickly becomes a blur that I leave behind. Sometimes in that drive I find beauty, and sometimes in that drive I find fear. That familiar sensation that I am in the middle of this vast state by myself creeps upon me and whispers into my ear that I should be scared. But I swallow the notion down with a prayer, with God’s strength, and with my own.

There have been times when I could only see the tail lights of the car ahead of me. Times when the rain beat down so fiercely that I feared that I may very well float home, or just float away. There was a time when the fog was so dense that it clung and stuck and suffocated the landscape. Times when the sky grew dark, and the windshield wipers flew furiously in and out of my wary vision. There have been times that I’ve grasped the wheel so hard that I found it hard to unfurl my fists when I came to a rest stop. There have been times when I spent a whole hour praying, a whole hour waiting for my fears to cease. When my hands tingled with the fear that bubbled beneath the surface, the alarm that coursed through my veins.

But I take it all, what has been, and what will be, and I give it to God. For I am precious, and He will protect me, protect me from the world, and from myself.

Four and a half hours is a long time. I have spent it singing, listening to music, listening to books, praying, observing silence, making phone calls and just watching the landscape constantly change.

I usually try to keep my excitement of being home at bay until the last half hour stretch. But this time I will climb into my car with an uncertain feeling about what I will find when I return home after these nearly three months. Things are not the same, and there is no going back to the way they used to be. A familiar comfort settles in as I fly my car onto 290 and then quickly exit onto 359. I feel the way that things used to be. Like feeling a worn and familiar blanket, turning it over in your hands, draping it over cold shoulders. It feels happy and good and it fits well, but it’s just a memory. And memories can’t change what is. What remains is unfamiliar, like groping in the dark for a light switch that you’re not entirely sure exists.

It’s a lot of time to spend thinking, which is exactly what I would like to avoid. I would like to call my parents, or my aunt, I would like to call and talk to that poptart face, I would like to hear the voice of my best friend, I want to talk, I just don’t want to listen to the tired songs that live in my iPod or observe the silent hum of the road beneath the wheels.

Sometimes it feels as though the road extends itself, knowing that I would like to reach my goal and purposely lengthening itself to keep me from it. Sometimes I feel the weight of being completely alone, and it makes my chest hurt and my throat feel tight and my palms sweat. I just need to know that someone knows. Knows where I am, knows where I’m going. I just need to hear that voice of someone outside myself reassuring me that I am strong, capable and intelligent. Even though I already know these things. How funny is human nature that we can hear things over and over and over and still hearing it once over makes us feel so much better. Or maybe that’s just me.

I was shocked when recently I was told that if I got sick, that I could not come home. For my home is no longer that familiar safe place, but it has become isolation. The definition of “alone,” save for my two parents. “Home,” does not mean what it used to, nothing really means what it used to. And I feel this desperation to claw my way back to what normal was, and at the same time I fell the urge to fly forward and become the strongest version of myself possible. But here, in the present, I prepare for class; I wait for tomorrow, when I will get in my car, and drive home.