The road is my home

This isn't really for the assignment. This is something else.

The wheels of the truck rumble under his feet, a steady, relentless hum that he doesn’t even recognize as noise anymore. The world is dark outside the illumination of his headlights, but he doesn’t need to see it to know what’s there. Ditches, drainage pipes, fields of crops, the occasional billboard; those details he can fill in mentally. The dark focuses his attention. It’s just road; it’s just lights; it’s just him and the wheels turning round. He’s always like driving at night. He’s never thought of himself as a thinker of higher things, but over the years he’s discovered a pure and simple pleasure in the potency of driving alone with his thoughts at night.


With hours stretched before him at the wheel, he even ponders time itself. He knows that one can spend hours on the road, hardly aware of time passing. Long haul truck drivers mark miles, not minutes. Frequently hours pass without event, without a way to mark the time, so for the sake of your sanity, you stop paying attention to the numbers glowing above the radio. But you have to turn that attention somewhere, spacing out entirely will ease you to sleep quicker than you’d believe and in big trouble soon after. Sleepiness is the arch-enemy of the night driver; easy slumber is elusive during the day when it’s ‘time’ to sleep and your unwelcome companion in the driver’s seat.


Luckily, he doesn’t feel the pull of sleep tonight. Tonight, his memories are like a well-loved book he can open at random and revel in. The solid white line on the right side of the road is his boundary. He can feel the gravity of the road, anchoring him safe and sure to his allotted space. The road and the driver have grown to trust each other in the hours upon hours they have spent together. Now it holds him steady between the solid and dashed lines. The road curves… he doesn’t even think about it. His hands on the wheel, automatic and sure. Driving like this is sublime, a positive feedback loop he navigates in an eighteen wheeler. He smiles as he selects a jewel from his treasure chest of memory and loses himself to the past.


Through the haze of memory, he realizes that things look different. The sky is a slightly different shade of black than it was before. Then he can see just a little better. He notices the fake wood trim of the dashboard, the bright orange plastic on the gear shift, empty coffee cups. He watches as the scenery outside the truck slowly comes into focus. Trees, wildflowers, foxes bounding through the tall grass and away. The sun rises slowly and suddenly. Pouring itself up and over the edge of the earth with such powerful slowness that he thinks he might be dreaming. Leaving his memories is like waking up from a long sleep. Quiet and contemplative, but also ready for the sunlight and the chance of conversation that daytime brings. Despite his efforts not to, he stares at the sun rising until all he sees is the negative image of the huge burning star superimposed on the highway.


He breaks the silence and asks himself with a smile, “Well, how am I supposed to watch the road when the sun is doing that?”