If you’ve been driving long enough, you start to get this sense of surreal detachment… almost a dream state, where you’re not tired, but you’re not fully awake either – you’re just… driving.
The world around you flies by like a simulated movie, the road stretching relentlessly on, cars and vans and trucks and buses whizzing by you, ahead of you, behind you. All thought seems to subside; you cease to be a person, and you start to become another inhabitant of restless America, another robotic vagabond in the traffic flow, growing ever-further from home.
But then another cup of coffee and you start to remember: Hey, everywhere is home. As long as I am behind the wheel of this car, my trusted steed, I can inhabit any and every place on the earth. No more need I worry of being lost, of being estranged, of being lonely. For as long as I’m alive and I have a destination, albeit an invented one, no one is more on the right track than me.
Who said there’s anything unpleasant about being alone? I love being alone. Make no mistake: being alone is worlds from being lonely. Being lonely is one of the saddest things on this earth, but being alone is one of the most empowering. Yes, the days are sometimes long, yes, the hotel room is sometimes a little too vacant without someone to share it with at the end of the day, but all in all, I have my thoughts, my words, and my music. And there is always room for one more.
Another town, another state, another attempt at “settling down” – but I should know by now that for the hungry traveler, any such attempt is short-lived. As soon as everything is in its proper place, just before the dust remembers to settle, a stir will happen somewhere inside the soul – a phone will ring, a woman will smile, a breeze will blow – and then it will be out the door, back on the trusted steed, flying on the wings of fate to another invented destination.
