5

There is no activity that provides a greater sense of eternal calm than being on the road at night.

In summer, the windows are open and the cool air whips through you hair and in between your toes that rest carelessly on the dashboard. You could get high with that sweet breeze. In winter, you blankly stare at the barren wasteland on either side of you. It comforts you with the haunting novocaine of a loneliness you cannot experience anywhere else but there. You can always count on the lamps casting the world in an orange hue. They make the trees look like spidery sculptures. Each one illuminating the tiniest sliver of road until the next one arrives when all of the sudden they abandon you and all you are left with are the cold white headlamps of your own vehicle and an abyss on either side of you. Everything moves too slowly for you to realize you are barreling past small pockets of civilization where people are living lives you will never know about. Even each pair of headlights is its own microcosm. It is so easy to forget that each aluminum box on wheels contains a human being that has a final destination: their mistress, their mother, their kids, their friends, their dog, their bed. It is curious to contemplate all of the lives you are passing by at 70 miles per hour. And they will go on forever as an endless stream of synthetic light guiding us towards our destinations. In these sanctuaries, life is in transit, awaiting its final destination. Nothing and everything of significance happens in these small sanctuaries.

So much of my recent life has been spent en route to somewhere. Eight hours two times a month. Sixteen hours a month. Sixty four hours a semester. Over one hundred and twenty eight hours each school year. The hours in the summer from the city to the suburbs that drove everyone except me insane. It was always such a burden but we did it anyways. Perhaps we believed it is what the other wanted. No one was appeased by this arrangement but we went on deluding ourselves that it did.

Once I arrived at three in the morning after the most blissfully haunting bus ride it had ever been my pleasure to endure. I was not met at the station. There was no public transportation and a cab was impossible to procure. When I finally arrived, I was locked out of a building with no other person to contact to let me in. Therefore, I found it fitting to leave my current position as a lonely female in the center of an empty parking lot and sought sanctuary within a public safety office whose officers found the arrival of a young girl carrying luggage at three in the morning rather bizarre. A kindly officer with a heavy Boston accent found the entire situation hilarious and let me into the building I had been barred out of. Needless to say, the wide-eyed expression that greeted me and the police officer at three thirty in the morning was too priceless to ever forget. I spent the rest of the night nursing the sick. I never had the opportunity to take that wonderful night ride again.