Driving

driving

I’ve been sitting in the back seat of a car that has been driving through the countryside for as long as I can remember. I’m bored of the winding dirt tracks, the paddocks and the sunshine. I’ve had my fill of the ancient trees and the wild beauty. But I can see that the road is getting straighter.

I don't know how to drive.

I don’t know who has been driving the car, but I like sitting in the backseat. I don’t have to drive. I don't have to speak out, or articulate my thoughts. I do get hurt, but I don't understand it yet. Maybe I need to be in control to understand it. I am under a blue sky, yet I can see a storm brewing ahead. Now I can see that the road is getting wider, our car has broken onto the tarmac and every now and then I spot houses, grouped together as if to warm themselves in unity.

I still don’t know how to drive.

But now I’ve moved forward in the car. I’m in the front passenger seat, and I’m reading the map. I know where I want to go, and I can direct the driver where I need to go, yet the driver always has ultimate control.

I still don’t know how to drive.

The road is getting larger and larger, and suddenly this side road that has been the route of my journey so far, has become the highway. And with equal shock, I realise I am driving the car having never been taught how to do so. I’m relying on my memory of the driver’s actions, yet the words they have given me throughout the journey become stagnant, all I remember is what they did.

I’m learning how to drive.

The highway is advancing officiously through suburbia, and by now the houses are surrounding each other, stifling each other, hurting and confusing each other. There are more cars now than ever before, more lives on the line. The traffic around me terrifies me; death seems to me a horrifying response to a small mistake.

I’m still learning how to drive.

By now, there are people that I love sitting in the car with me, and I know that my actions will affect their journeys, my words may hurt them. I can never sleep; if I lose control then they may die. The clouds are gathering overhead.

I’m learning how to drive with them in the car.

The storm breaks and the sky begins to cave in. But I can see my objective now; the city. The imposing skyline scares me and shakes me, but after all this is where I have wanted to be my whole life... isn’t it?

I’m in the city now. This great mess of humanity is so much more than I imagined, the pain and the confusion are stifling. Yet it is so much less. It is not fulfilment as I believed it would be. Now I’m concentrating so hard on the road that I don’t notice that the people in my car are gone.

I’m in the very heart of the city now, in the temple of nothingness, where we worship the parts of our lives that remain unfeeling and painless.

I park my car.

And it is only now that I realize that I’m lost.

I do not know who I am or why my loved ones are gone, and all I want is the winding dirt tracks, the paddocks, the sunshine; the ancient trees and the wild beauty of the countryside.