"after all those trains and all those breakdown lanes"

[omnia_mutantur]

 Day 5.  

Stayed up way later than I normally do last night (1am), sucked into a book I was reading and unable to disengage.  Slept in my room, alone, which almost never happens.  I still kind of wish I could sleep with the dog, but I get that she’s happier in her crate.  Sadly, the cats didn’t get the memo and screamed me awake at 6:30 to get fed.

 

Drove out to the ‘burbs to visit my little brother, Media and Saint, and their two kids, Coolidge and Kilometers.  Unexpectedly, it became a family thing and Mech, Teach, Tank and the lone girlchild of this generation joined us.  (maybe it’s a thing, there can be only one girl per generation, though I believe that at least two generations prior to me had no girlchildren born into the family whatsoever).  (I’m glad I got rid of my dad’s last name when I married Light, but sometimes I wish there had been some obvious and unremarkable third option.)

 

Media and his wife and two kids live about an hour from here, in a big house on a private way.  Mech and his wife and their two kids are hoping to move about the same amount away, currently they live about twenty minutes away.  They talk about buying houses that cost twice what Light and I spent on this condominium, and it makes me wonder whether it’s a thing I should be wanting.

 

Been thinking about my history with cars, my patterns of driving and not driving, wondering what would have been different if I hadn’t been so scared of my boss I didn’t dare call out and taken that ill-advised trip on the mass pike that ended up with my car mounted on a guard rail, and how I never got the stain of the coffee that had gone airborne off of the ceiling.  

 

It was hard to learn to drive, I didn’t trust my mother enough to teach me to ride a bike, much less anything more complicated, and my father wasn’t interested in the project.  The driver’s ed teacher told me to have my parents to teach me how to drive in reverse, my parents told me to have the teacher teach me.  So after I got my license, I took the grey ford taurus to a parking lot and tried to understand how the whole thing worked.  I’m still not very good at it, too alarmed by the prospect of bumping someone else’s car.  My depth perception isn’t great, but I can work around it, but something just unravels when I tried to flip it and reverse the calculations.

 

I think I loved driving once. I know I loved my cars, extensions of myself, indisputably mine in a way nothing else ever was. I loved the opportunity to listen to my music as loudly as I could, I loved the anonymity of being alone in a car.  I know that I hated them too, the first one when each repair required a rebalancing of what I was spending money on, the second one another loan I had to pay off, bought only about a month before I had to leave the startup job.

 

I gave that car to Mech when I moved bostonwards, nowhere to keep a second car, we were interested in being a single-car family and I did not want to drive her, and I let those skills atrophy and kept thinking of the cars as Light’s, not mine to drive, not mine to ruin and so just sources of anxiety, even if Light always thought of them as ours.
 

After that second accident, driving became this exhausting process of trying to figure out everything that could possibly move into my path, and have a plan about how to deal with it.  Not just cars and trucks careening towards me in my imagination, but dogs darting into traffic, trees falling.  I’d brace for impact every time I took a corner, every time I merged, believing it was only a matter of when I’d get hit again.

 

It was nice to see them all, it was nice to get to listen to a good solid chunk of my audiobook.  But I still forget to remember that driving makes me tired, even in this new  lightly calmer era. 

Comments

[electrolite37]

I couldn't get the backwards driving thing down. When he eventually realized that he was going to have to participate in the learning to drive process, AK took the cones and poles we had been using to mark out parking spaces, put them in a well-spaced line, and I had to drive a reverse obstacle course. It was crazy and dumb but it made it stick. I still praise my back-up camera every time it winks into life.

There are days that I love driving and there are days when getting behind the wheel is the last thing I want to do. I was surprisingly exhausted after driving from NY to MD on Sunday - needing to lie still in a darkened room while half-napping to Netflix exhausted. Maybe that's why I love trains. The constant sense of movement and noise and rhythm, but you still get to read a book or zone out while staring at scenery. It feels like every third trip something nearly happens that makes me catch my breath and then I'm white knuckling the wheel until the end. But unlike the life of riding shotgun to AK, I can play Haim as loud as I want and shriek the lyrics into the dark of the NJ Turnpike.