The Drive Home
A story about deep feelings for shallow things
The sun began to fall below the horizon, spreading orange over everything like a toddler with a bag of Cheetos. I had been on the road for 10 minutes, but home was still 40 miles away. It was a warm Sunday evening. Traffic was light. There wasn’t much to distract my attention.
I tried to keep my eyes on the road, but they wandered sporadically, like a honey bee in a blooming meadow, pausing briefly on whatever they could find. I subconsciously interrupted that nervous scanning when I pressed my hand to my face, rubbing it up and down. I tried to parse my feelings.
It’s not that big of a deal. Why is this affecting you so much?
Again, I tried to focus on the road as I replayed the whole thing in my head. It all happened in an instant. I thought maybe going through it over and over again would help me make sense of it all or find some secret realization that would take me back in time to fix it.
What if I turn around right now? I can just take the next exit. It won’t take that long. This could potentially be fixed...
…Yeah, but you know it’s a long shot. Do you really want to spend all that time and energy on it? Is it even worth it?
As I approached the next exit, the scenario played out like the scene in A Goofy Movie, where Goofy asks Max which exit they should take on their road trip. I sped up the argument in my head to see if I could gather more data to help me make a decision.
Straight or right? Straight or right? STRAIGHT OR RIGHT?!
A few seconds later, I drove straight past the exit — partially because I had just enough doubt about it all and partially because it was the path of least resistance. Ironically enough, that became my turning point. I had made my decision. I wouldn’t entertain the idea of turning around again, even at future exits.
With a sense of finality, I puffed my cheeks and let out a long breath through my pursed lips. I do that often when I’m stressed or anxious about something. Usually I don’t realize I’m feeling that way until I catch myself halfway through exhaling. But now that I knew I was stressed to the point of doing my puffy-cheeks-pursed-lips exhale thing, I got even more worked up.
What is your deal?!
The clock read 7:48 p.m. I still had 30 miles to go, but the last 10 miles had been a blur. It was all still so fresh on my mind. To expedite my coping process, I tried to convince myself that I would soon laugh about how dumb I was being. Surprisingly, that thought exercise actually helped dilute the strange mix of emotions inside of me.
I turned on a podcast to try and distract myself, but after a few minutes, I realized I wasn’t paying attention. Even when I wasn’t actively trying to decipher my feelings, my brain was doing it on autopilot. I wasn’t going to get anything out of a podcast. I continued to drive in silence, though it still wasn’t silent in my head.
Slowly, I began to latch on to brief moments of relief. They would come and go, but they stayed a little longer each time. Once I was able to feel some relief and a small semblance of control, I curiously began experimenting with calling back the thoughts I had just spent the last 20 minutes trying to eliminate. I wanted to try and dissect them now that I had found my way through them. It was fascinating how easily I could call those feelings back and experience them with a sense of clarity. It felt similar to how people enjoy horror movies. It feels real enough to scare you, but logically you know it’s just a movie, so there is a safe passage out if you can’t handle it.
Okay, okay. It isn’t that big of a deal. Did I really think what we had would last forever?
My answer to that internal question was no. I didn’t think it would last forever. But like most good things, you don’t think through how it all might end. You just enjoy it while it’s there. All those blissful thoughts had already yielded a nice warm ball of dopamine inside of me. I couldn’t wait to actually live that imagined future.
But all that dopamine slipped out the car window along with Rex. Now they both lay on the side of the road. As I pictured him there alone, strewn among shredded rubber and freeway trash, a logically absurd but still somehow forlorn hope filled my mind:
Was his little dinosaur face at least facing up so he could see the stars?
I scrunched away a tingle in my nose. He would be fine. It took a giant, burning asteroid shower to kill his ancestors. And they were real flesh and blood dinosaurs — not a cheap plastic bracelet from a kid’s meal.
God speed, my little friend. God speed.
