Hour 1:
Everything is fine. You’ve likely just eaten breakfast, and you’re super excited about the prospect of sleeping in your own room tonight. There is lots of fuel in the gas tank, and there is a lot of time ahead, so even if you aren’t feeling some of the songs that you put on your playlist, you don’t skip them.
Hour 2:
You’re still not on the turnpike just yet. You’ve made one wrong turn, and you’ve missed another. The GPS has given you that trite “Recalculating!” in its sassy and condescending voice. It sounds more pompous today than it usually does. You’re having the first feelings of anguish. These smaller highways experience dense traffic, so maybe you’ve had a few close encounters or seen some drivers that you absolutely despise. It’s early enough that you can still shrug it off.
Hour 3:
Toll gate! You see the name of your home city on the sign and you cheer a little bit out loud, only until you realize you’re the only one in the car. This hour flies. The turnpike is quite a bit more open than the roads you were just on, and in addition to that, the speed limit is higher.
Hour 4:
This hour and the hour before it are very flat. There are a lot of farms. The music keeps you focused and attentive (maybe even awake). You stop to use the restroom and to eat. You realize that it’s 4 p.m. and you’re only just eating lunch. It goes down much more quickly than it took to prepare. You hesitate before getting back in the car, because you don’t want to give up the feeling of being unrestricted by a seat belt again. You stretch and attempt crack your back.
Hour 5:
It’s twilight and you’re in the mountains. You start to notice the music a little bit more as you speed around the curves that have begun to appear past the flat landscape. This hour passes a little more slowly, but only because you keep checking the GPS to see how far away you are from the exit. You might even say this is the most enjoyable and serene hour of the trip.
Hour 6:
You’ve finally gotten off of the turnpike and you expect to be home within the hour. Key word: “expect." You reach the city, but the only problem is that you live on the other side of it. To make things worse, the traffic is at a standstill. It seems the road department knew you were coming home today, so they closed all of your favorite bridges and tunnels and made you merge onto a two-lane road and take the most ridiculous detour ever. You’re skipping just about every song now. It has half to do with the fact that you over-prepared and your playlist is 15 hours long, and half to do with the fact that none of the songs could possibly cheer you up.
Hour 7:
You emerge from the traffic jam and it feels just like those late summer nights when you would go out for drives to clear your mind. The road is open, and most importantly, it’s one you recognize completely. You roll the windows down. It’s 34 degrees outside. You roll them right back up. At a certain point (and you know exactly where it is for you – it’s different for each person) it starts to feel like you’re driving home from somewhere you’ve been a million times before, not from your school hundreds of miles away. This makes you forget all about the entire drive up until that moment. Of course, you’re still tired, but you get that “I’m just coming home from the mall” feeling, and it really changes everything.
You reach your driveway and you throw the car in park. You don’t even turn off the lights or remove your bags from the trunk just yet. You kneel down in the wash of your headlights and consider kissing the ground in front of you. You think better of it. All that matters is that you’re home now.
