Drive

When I got up this morning, I wanted to get in my car and drive until everything around me was different, until everyone and everything I knew had disappeared. I wanted to leave behind my house, my books, my clothes, my job. My mother and my father, my boyfriend, my dogs, my name. Everything about this so-called life of mine. I wanted to shed it all, like a skin I'd outgrown, and step fragile and new into another life.

It didn't matter where I went. I could have driven west, chasing the sun, until the land turned to water again. I could have gone to the desert and watched the sunset, the sky fading into purples and blues like an angry bruise. I could have gone north, into the mountains, delirious at the sight of all that blue-green beauty. I could have gone back to the town I grew up in, haunting the familiar places like a ghost.

The destination wasn't important, only the leaving. I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere but here.

Instead, I got up and took a walk around my neighborhood. I listened to the birds singing in the trees, breathed in the smell of fresh-cut grass. I felt the road under my feet, the distance from home as long or as short as I wanted to make it.

Every so often it takes hold of me, this urge to begin again. I can't explain it, this need to shake off the past and start over with a fresh history. It's a want I don't understand, a want to be something more than ordinary.

I could have gone. I could go still. I have the means, all I lack is the will. For now though, I choose to stay here, in this life. But if someday I should disappear, know that I'm out there, on the road, chasing down my destiny.