Portfolio Piece #3 (Keep Moving)

I used to love driving at night. Even when I was younger and only grown-ups sat behind the wheel, I was infatuated. I liked it when my dad would pick me up from a friend’s house after dark and we would take the freeway home. I would look out the window and watch the big brick buildings fly by my window, the “adult alternative” station that my parents loved so much playing peacefully in the background. The needle on the speedometer flirted with 80, but everything was slow inside the car. When it was even later, I would start to drop off, lulled to sleep by the wheels’ soft static shh as we moved forward. But it was only when my friends got their licenses that my casual fling with night-driving became a love affair.

It was later at night. The music was better. We had nowhere to go: no dinner to get home to, no parents in the car to slow us down. Our only goal: pile as many people as possible into Rich’s SUV and get gone. Rich was eighteen and didn’t have a curfew. He drove like a crazy person but never actually hit anything, which was enough of a reason to assure our parents that he was the safest driver we had ever had the pleasure of sharing a car with. I always managed to secure a seatbelt at the least, but usually I got the front seat, despite being the shortest and the loudest in the car. I could see everything.

Early in the night, everyone was always amped, convinced that we’d find some secrets tucked away in our personal corner of suburbia. The air was an animated amalgam of words. We talked to every person at once in the same sentence. “And then I said—no, you can’t open the window—that I was going to—please take that away from her—kill him if he didn’t give me back the keys, even though they weren’t technically mine—we can’t go to that Dunkin Donuts—but he didn’t believe me—because the guy hates me there, that’s why—so I just snatched them and ran—because I dropped a jelly donut on the floor and stepped on it—and he didn’t chase me, so I guess they’re mine now.”

But as the night wore on and we wore out, our tangled ball of conversations diminished until it was one long thread, all of us grabbing onto it and adding things here and there. Sometimes I would talk, but other times I would just look. Other times I would take in the everything around me, because I could. Because, for once, no one was asking me to do anything else. I noticed Rich’s hands as we drove, his fingers spread lazily over the wheel, almost lovingly, looking so different from rush hour, when his white knuckles strangled the black leather, when I would wonder if he was going to swerve into traffic and slam his beloved car into the pink convertible that had just cut us off again. His whole face was relaxed, his mouth forming the words to the latest inane summer hit that we couldn’t help but love.

The city flowed around us like water, every landmark, every 7-11 and strip mall blurring and fading into nothingness. We were free, not inhabiting this earth, bound by only two rules: yield to pedestrians, and by all means, keep moving.