“Accidentes?”
I hope not.
“Foot Fungus?”
No thank you.
“Pregnant and Alone?”
Nope.
I silently answered the billboards as they flashed past, as familiar to me as the feel of my cracked steering wheel beneath my fingers. The road I navigated was like a worn book that had been read too many times; familiar, comforting, and difficult to pay attention to. I occupied myself reading and rereading billboards, squinting at the often times offensive bumper stickers on the cars around me, and singing so loud that fellow drivers often turned their heads in amusement or annoyance as my voice permeated the thin fabric of my convertible roof. Sometimes I scoff at the cars around me, plastered in stickers or dents, but then I remember my own car was covered in both, proclaiming me an off-campus college student, a Hogwarts Alumni, and frequent fender bender victim.
It was easy to forget how I looked from the safe interior of my hand-me-down Sebring. Within the heavy, talkative vehicle, I felt safe, at home, guarded. Probably in large part because I spent more time in the car than just about anywhere else, making the treacherous drive back and forth between campus and home—an hour each way with the city traffic—on the road that was as good as home.
That road, SR 436, knew me inside and out. It was privy to my first ever expedition into the unknown world of driving as a white-knuckled fifteen-year-old. It was a bystander to the rainy slip and slide of a car into my rear bumper, leaving the second of several holes in the back end. It witnessed the time I broke down crying on it’s shoulder after I left the house of my first boyfriend for the last time. It was the sole witness to the moment when I became a murderer, hitting an unseen cat as it bolted across the road, and once again, it sat with me as I cried into the empty night that weighed so heavy around my car, my partner in crime. It knew the tone of my off-key singing voice, had the order of the songs on my driving playlists memorized, and was more than familiar with the way my car pulled just slightly to the right. It sported a ragged black scar along the far right lane before the overpass by Colonial, courtesy of my screaming tires on a rainy night when I paid too little attention and the light changed too fast.
Most days were uneventful though, it was only very infrequently that 436 suffered any ill will from me. Like today, as I talked back to the faces on the billboards, trying to force my mind to remain alert. The glowering signs remained adamantly inanimate, so I had no distraction from the dull annoyances of rude drivers and the repetition of grey roads and run-down buildings flashing in my mirrors. The metal monsters honked and swerved, irritating me like an itch on the part of the back that is forever out of reach. Partially out of boredom, and partially to keep from the road rage that tapped on my short temper, I made up stories for the people I passed.
The man with the horn-happy hand two cars back at the red-lit intersection of 436 and Curry Ford was on his way to a wedding, and if he was late he would never be able to make it up to the bride, his estranged daughter who had reached out to him for the first time in six years to invite him to her wedding day. If he was late, she would never forgive him.
There was a woman in a tan minivan with a colorful rosary draped over the rearview mirror, flipping off a guy who wouldn't let her into the right lane just before University Boulevard. She was not simply full of hate for slow traffic and inconsiderate drivers, but rather filled with sorrow at the son she lost barely a year before. Her impatience today was the culmination of her endless pain, sitting with only her thoughts in a car bought for a boy she no longer had, and a rosary for a god she no longer believed in still draped in her view. A gift from her little boy, back when she believed what she taught him about a merciful lord.
The woman yelling at the man on the median beside my window was cursing, not because it was her nature, but because this man had been cruel to her, used her, and now she was running from him, to freedom, to a better life on the other side of the white dashed lines beneath my tires.
This little exercise occupied my mind most days, keeping me calm, keeping me focused. Of course, occasionally it would fail, the illusion would break, and I would become just another car, shoving my way into gaps in the next lane far too tight for my car; no blinker, no warning. I would honk impatiently with the rest at the flicker of red to green. Sometimes I would be the subject of honking, like when I fell into daydreams at the doldrums of intersections, waiting for the line to move again. My eyes would wander, to pick at the pucker of the self-applied burgundy nail polish on my left pointer finger, to check my phone, to notice the little birds on the tangled electrical wirings overhead, their tales swinging forward and back, forward and back in an attempt to steady them in their balancing act. I watched as the wind blew lightly, and one by one, their grey silhouettes grew and fluttered to the alcove along the overpass, where the worn concrete made for a much sturdier resting spot. In times like this, I would inevitably miss the universal green signal, and would be met by the angry blast of more than one impatient soul. Each time, without fail, my automatic response was a terrible hot-cold wash of pins and needles and a numb slam of my foot on the squishy pedal of my car, jolting me forward with an anticlimactic revving that drowned out the horns reverberating in my ears.
This was my life for that commuter year of college. Back and forth, back and forth. I knew the words to every song on my phone, and most on the radio. I knew that there was an invisible pothole ten seconds after I turned onto 436 from Aloma on my way home, and I swerved without conscious thought to miss it each time. I knew that there were twenty-four “Drive Safely” memorial signs between the point where I turned on 436 at Curry Ford and the point when I turned off at Aloma. I knew that there was a raised part of the road just before the light on Dahlia Drive, and if the light was green and traffic was clear, I hit it at full speed and felt for a second as though I was flying. I knew that there were three ragged homeless men who traded places at University, and another that waited patiently each day at Old Cheney. I knew that if I left at 8:03 a.m. in the morning, the road would be clear, and yet if I left at 8:07, I would somehow inexplicably be caught up in an extra thirty minutes of traffic.
Sometimes I truly hated that road, with its endless smog, the continuous blaring of horns, and its tendency to suck hour after hour from my ever-exhausting life. And yet, after a year away from the commute, I find myself inexplicably missing my time with the road, alone with my thoughts in my little beat up car. Perhaps I miss the chance to think. Perhaps I miss the excuse to listen to music and do nothing productive. Perhaps I miss my little delusions about the people around me. Whatever the reason, sometimes I feel the need to jump in my car and make the hellish drive I used to hate so much, meeting the warlike road like an old friend.
