Put It in Drive

I set out with no place in mind and no intentions of stopping. I said I’d be back soon and I just got in and took off. The CD player is cycling through a mix and I don’t even notice the music until I catch myself singing along. Now I am twenty minutes away from my house staring at the entrance to an old Air Force base. I wish it were the way it was when life happened here.

I turn into the base and see skid marks on the asphalt and signs blurred by snow. I imagine checkpoints, Jeeps, and security clearances. Now there is nothing. There is nothing here and nothing in the places surrounding it. Office buildings where hangars once stood. This is a ghost of what it used to be. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. This area is still the same. This area is nothing.

I am driving in the opposite direction now. The weather has turned to sleet and freezing rain mixed with snow and it forms a vortex outside my windshield. I flick the wipers to a faster setting and I am making sure to turn with every curve and bend in the road but I am not thinking about my foot on the accelerator. I watch the snow fall at every stoplight and think that it seems like nothing is moving, nothing is breathing or living out here. Nothing is. I love this song.

I am driving in the middle of the night back toward my house. I have been driving for hours with no particular place to go except wherever the thought of you takes me. And as I am riding these familiar streets in this familiar town, I realize that this is the place I come to run away from you because this place is always the same. It never changes, is never different, but you, you are unpredictable and gutsy. This is the place I come to run away from you because I am afraid to not know the answer, not know the future, not have a definite plan, a concrete view of how this will be. I am turning into my driveway and I see that I’ve wasted a half a tank and a half a year.

I realize that I am always safe, I always have a plan. I sit in my car with the music turned up and the heat blasting and I think about how I have never taken any major risks in my life. I always calculate everything, am always so careful and sure before I take a step. I am always safe, I always have a plan.

Before I realize what has happened, I have backed out of my driveway again and I am facing down the road I have lived on my entire life. I put it in drive and head toward the New York State Thruway, this I know, and, true, I do know where I am going. I am running away from the place I run to when I want to run away from you. I am leaving the place that has been my home and been so predictable, unchanging. I am running away.

I am going home.