Mood Piece January 19 2018

The car wheels droned on against the asphalt. Their steady tone had a calming effect on her mind, seeming to dull the edges of the world around her. She loved the feeling of driving, the longer the better honestly. For as long as she was on the road the rest of the world was somewhere else, something theoretical, a thing to be turned over in her mind. Trees whipped past the window, their distant clarity turning to blurs as she got closer to them. Their details bled out by her speed.

Her hands and feet deftly maneuvered the vehicle, going through the motions of their task without a single thought from her. It had taken focus, once, to drive the car. She had been aware of every subtle shift in the giant metal machine, every jerk of it when she hit the brake too hard, the momentum it had when she took a turn. Now though, her body followed the well-worn patterns of a hundred hours of practice. Now though, her mind was free to wander on its own journey trusting fully to her body's memory and her senses guidance. It was strange, she thought, that well practiced distance with her own body. Like she had been possessed, her body hijacked by her own past selves until it was just a layering of habits she could barely remember making. There was something liberating in that surrender though. Something freeing in becoming a witness to her own mind. She allowed her former selves to pilot her body while her present self sought to reconcile ghosts with their futures.

She had never been on this particular road before. In fact, she had never been anywhere near this road before. It was strange, she thought, how memories from places nothing like this could take her so calmly into the unknown. So much of life was like that. She had learned to walk within the first few years and from then on her legs had taken her everywhere; Up mountains, down beaches, through hallways and down sidewalks. Through doorways. How much of life was just a continuation of the past? How much was just drawing old patterns onto new canvases? It suddenly felt like her life had some kind of impersonal momentum, carrying her like the car did. She could make small adjustments, indeed was constantly making small adjustments, but the thing had a speed now and the great weight of its own body, and it could scatter her down a mile of unknown road in an instant if she let it.

The thought wasn’t entirely unpleasant. It added a sense of reality to everything around her, reminding her that everything had its own sort of agency to bring to the table. Her and the car were unlikely partners on a journey, with her casting forward into the mist while it obeyed only the inputs of the past to carry them forward. That it was a both a tenuous and practiced alliance gave it all a sense of exhilaration and veracity. Whatever else was true, she thought, you could always trust a contradiction.

The sound of the wheels changed slightly as she took a curve, the momentum of the car and her body dragging her world sideways for a moment, pushing them both closer to the earth. She allowed herself a smile as a long straight stretch appeared before her. She loved the feeling of driving, the longer the better honestly; and she hoped then that this drive might never end.