For a second, I felt invincible.
There was no one around me then, nothing to come close but the wind streaming through the cracked windows. The open road in front of me lay open with opportunity and vacant of chaos. On the map, I saw the destination call for me like a promised land, etched with the comfort of direction and the solace of structure. Ahead lies the same peace of the past I felt safe in.
Yet I sped up.
The wind picked up beside me. I relaxed my hands as the number on the speedometer rose. In the rearview, I caught a final glimpse of the pavement I used to drive on and—in a moment that I thought was a revelation—wondered how I could have possibly tolerated the monotonous highway that now looked so dull in the face of the wind and the risk.
I took my hands off the wheel, and for a mere moment, I was unyielding.
But suddenly the road around me was full. I traced the road for the white lines that I once happily accepted as my guide. My foot came down on a brake that wouldn’t work and my hands reached for a wheel that wouldn’t turn the right way. The wheels tilted toward the shoulder, erratic with a gravitational force of defiance to my panicked clawing towards the other direction.
As the wheels sped toward the ditch, I could hear the screaming whisper of the cars honking around me, muffled by a scream I can only assume was my own. No one sat in the passenger seat beside me to save me. I push the brakes one more time, yet no final effort can contradict the racing speed of such a slippery slope. I braced myself for impact.
And then the car was on fire.
It is only in the orange flame that I began to see all too clearly;
I have found no trouble in mistaking recklessness for rationality and thinking the two must cancel each other out somehow.
I used to be able to see the destination ahead of me regardless of the veil of smoke that now lingers. I have suddenly crashed on the road that I traverse in the present, and the path of the past is nothing but a lesson that I am not sure I have learned from yet.
All of a sudden, I have no idea where I am going or how to get there, stuck hitting the accelerator faster than I can handle and justifying it by trying to get a few steps ahead. I can see the blur of the exits in my peripheral view and ignore them for a destination with no known promises but the ones I have constructed in my mind. Such naivety warrants the consequence of a desperate attempt to rekindle the peace that I had driven right into a tree.
The flare of the fire is now accompanied by the burn of the question I crashed with: Was it not just enough to be comfortable?
I saw it all in the orange flames, with their ignorance mistaken for valor and their freedom misjudged as invincibility; the roads have become too hazardous to take peace for granted.
