April 12th, night time
Imagine driving on a long, straight highway with nothing else around you but good music, good companion, and a map spread out right next to you. You look outside; and it's a bright, clear day with trees rustling and birds chirping and sun peeking between the clouds, just strong enough to keep you warm inside the car but not too much that you get instantly cranky. It's a perfect setting and you hum along to the tunes in the radio because you know it off the back of your head. You've been singing to the same tune and smiling at the same buck-toothed toll ticket guy for as long as you live. Rapping your fingernails on the steering wheel as you hum along and reaching out to your backseat to find that half-open bag of chips ready to be devoured every time you feel your tummy grumble. It has become automatic. Familiar. Standard operating procedure. Your default system.
In short, you like knowing where things are.
You like the ease of placing things and the comfort of knowing that you're doing the right thing. Each of those sunny morning turns to nice evenings with cool airs and eventually into dark, balmy nights. You love it; you love knowing exactly when the color of the skies are going to change. You enjoy the tick of the dashboard clock cos it always signals the change of time at the exact minute and second. Morning, noon, evening, night. And repeat. It's your every day routine. You honk when you see a deer accidentally crossing the street and sigh in relief when it jumps back to avoid your car. The smile returning to your face, you lean back at your headrest and shift back to second gear. It's safe, it's comfortable, it's easy, it's something that you know everyone is expecting you to do.
You go ahead and keep driving; the road is still a stretch and stretch and stretch of miles with no other car around and no indication of where it's going to end. The seasons slowly change, and the autumn leaves are starting to fall; brown and red specks filling up your car roof and blocking your view but hey, so what? All you need to do is turn the wiper on and poof, the leaves slide off. Easy. Convenient. Predictable. Nothing you can't handle.
And then one night; one cool, perfectly windy night, as you lower the sound of the radio and listen to the soft hum of your engines running, taking in the comfortable, soothing silence,
A monster truck is speeding right towards you.
Its headlight glaring and engines roaring, it takes you by so much surprise that, for the first time in your twenty five years of driving, you step on that brake as hard as you can and feels your heart drop to the freaking floor and you hear someone drawing in a sharp breath until you realize it's actually your own. Panicking, you quickly shift the gear into reverse and hear the tires screech as your car speeds backwards, your heart pounding in the rib cage. And this truck; this thing that comes out of nowhere and shocks the hell out of you; it's not backing down. Its huge headlights are blinding your face and couldn't care less if it makes you lose concentration in the middle of the night. The map is crumpled now; the bag of chips fell down to the floor and scattering everywhere and the car alarm is ringing and the music stops playing and just like that, your world is upside down.
This truck keeps charging towards you, forcing you to take no other way but back into where you started. Back into before you even entered the highway. Forcing you to finally look left and right instead of always looking straight ahead and with each mile you passed backward, your heart is pounding in your ears and you get this chill, this eye-opening, face-slapping chill when you realize what you've been missing all your life. The unknown is always scary, so you can imagine how scared shitless you are. You feel like you took a wrong detour and you want to rip the map in two in frustration. You feel like you can no longer rely on your trusted car, the CD sounds awful and those chips taste bitter. Everything feels wrong now. Something is tugging in your chest and it begins with a U and ends with a Y. It's the one thing you hate, your arch nemesis.
It's like a flashback rolling back each decision you made in your mind; when you took right instead of left; when you said no instead of yes; when you just refuse to open up and to just be adventurous and steer off the path instead of staying in the track all the time. There are road signs everywhere- why didn't you take a leap?? Why did you never take off your seatbelt to hear that satisfying pop? The highway you chose was everything you're fond of, everything you like, everything you're comfortable with--but it's not something you've always dreamed of.
April 13th, 00: 40
I can still hear the tires screeching. And somehow, something tells me this is not bound to end anytime soon.
