a driving story
I’ve never been much of a morning person, but somehow I’m always being forced to wake up earlier than 10 a.m. An ambitiously scheduled exercise class here, a family vacation there, or just my usual 8:30 a.m. clock-in-for-work time. It all seems unreasonable. Why cut short the one truly peaceful part of the day? Yet there I was being awoken by my mother at 6 a.m., telling me I’m already late for something. I laid in bed for what felt like a few extra minutes, but in reality was closer to twenty, contemplating my chances at a quick, sexy lucid dream. But no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t force my brain into a dreamworld where I’m dating SNL’s Colin Jost. It didn’t matter much because a few minutes later my mother burst into the room a second time to remind me of the time. I was supposed to be up and dressed with my duffel bag ready to go, for our dysfunctional family vacation to Cape Cod.
It was too early to form words, but the echoes of my father and sister fighting made me hopeful for the weekend to come. Maybe one of the them would finally kill the other and I could have the back seat to myself for the long car ride. As we made it into the car an hour and a half past our staunchly set departure time, I chose to ask if we could stop for coffee. The words were out of my mouth before I could think about them, my survival instinct overriding my higher thought process. I had to hear another ten minutes of bickering, but it was worth it. I got my coffee with a healthy side of sarcasm, but at least I got my coffee.
We’d been traveling for around 40 minutes when I found myself falling into a pattern of staring directly into the cars that passed us on the highway. Being crammed into the small back seat of a car with my sister brought out the opportunist in me. While my sister mimed out her escape plan through the roof of the car, I managed to stare deep into the soul of every car, truck, and automobile that we passed. I saw a beautiful girl with a round face and long wavy hair, with her windows down. A short blonde mother stretching to see over the steering wheel with her tutu wearing offspring in the backseat. A man who was either caught mid-yawn or was bearing his teeth at me to assert his dominance. The woman exiting the highway while picking her nose. The Mark Ruffalo look-alike. The big-rig driver looking either right at me, or down my shirt. On second thought he was probably just trying to switch lanes; there isn’t much to see down there anyway. While staring through their cars and into their souls, I couldn’t help but wonder about all these seemingly normal people. Where are all these people going? What are they thinking? What does it all mean? Do they know how much I need to poop?
Once my creepiness reached its peak and I’d caught the eye of almost every driver we had passed, I became acutely aware of the fact that I was wearing my extremely trendy, giant mirrored sunglasses. They’re perfect in that they hide a good portion of my face and show you yours instead. I looked like a giant blue eyed fly loitering just outside these cars, waiting for a window to roll down to make my move. It’s no wonder everyone kept passing us. I saw a man hand-crank his window up just as he passed me, in what I can only imagine was a desperate attempt to keep my penetrating bug eyes away from his car-soul. In a moment of weakness, I redirected my gaze.
After riding on the highway for some time, I eventually lost interest in staring down my fellow travelers. We passed an all too inviting body of water, the idyllic kind you might see in a magazine, and something in my brain switched. I longed to leap from the moving car straight into the water, back to my sparkling evolutionary roots. How refreshing it would feel to wipe away these ‘I can’t poop’ sweats with ice cold lake water. I was distracted from calculating just how soon death would come if I were to jump out of this moving car by an interesting black SUV that creeped up on the side of us. It was blocking my view and bringing me back to my unfortunate reality. I stared right at it and saw a woman in a sleek black Jeep with hair to match and a diamond bigger than her fingernail, peering over her steering wheel. I wondered, had she gotten to poop today?
