Nighttime on the Highway

A Nighttime Drive To Escape A Spiral of Anxious Thought

The tachometer sputters and the engine whirs below the musings of a lonely singer. Everything that happens, he croons through the speakers, a guitar thrumming under him, is from now on. I twist up the volume knob and shift my grip on the steering wheel so I can see my hands glowing in the moonlight spearing through the windows.

I work the gas and the asphalt blurs under the hood, worn and fissured and charred with tire tracks, and even though I don’t believe in an afterlife, I wonder if this is what limbo is like. Speeding on a nighttime highway past equally solitary cars, music vibrating against the doors in a strange eternal loop.

I drive whenever I feel like I’ve missed something, or like something has missed me. I usually convince myself that I’ll find that something by the time I switch off the ignition, but I never do. The only reason my failure hasn’t stopped me yet is because it feels better to try than to concede. But tonight is different. I’m driving to outpace the obsessive-compulsive squalls in my head.

I pull into the left lane and watch the median strip pass. What would happen if I sideswiped it, grinded the car doors against that rusty railing? Would there be sparks, and would my car give out grating metallic cries and then flip over, and what would it feel like to flip with it? Would cars behind me swerve out of the way or would they crush my vehicle into a mass of amorphous steel and plastic and send it clanking and skittering into the night, and would the engine smoke and burst into flames, and would it smell like motor oil or gasoline before it exploded, and what would it feel like to burn on this dark highway purgatory?

This is pouring rain, the speakers pulsate, this is paralyzed.

I swallow, cough, try to stop thinking about dying. My resistance briefly works, but the thoughts return. What if the materials on the truck bed in front of me come loose and fly through the windshield and decapitate me? Would I stay conscious for a few seconds? Minutes? Would I feel pain or would I be numb? Would I miss being alive or be relieved to be dead?

There’s a black crow sitting across from me, the singer breathes, and his wiry legs are crossed. And he’s dangling my keys, he even fakes a toss. Whatever could it be that has brought me to this loss?

To logically convince myself that the thoughts are only thoughts would only make them worse. So I do what I’ve been taught by friends and family and therapists alike. I listen to my pulse. I breathe deeply until my throat aches. I focus on the feeling of my feet in my shoes and imagine that my car is a forest. That my seat is a mound of leaves.

This works, and I only wonder about morbid suffering in passing. The song is a deeper respite, the bassy tones of the guitar deepening with every strum, the squeak of fingers over its strings. Then the singer returns, his voice full of heartbreak.

This is not the sound of a new man or a crispy realization. It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away — your love will be safe with me.

That word — love. I wonder if mine is a struggle born of the inability to love myself, catastrophic imagination and macabre obsessions and all. In a bleak way, it seems like loving myself would involve accepting that I’m a hostage of my own unconscious, some strange product of self-induced Stockholm Syndrome. That idea both enrages and terrifies me.

I wonder — what if the something that I’ve been searching for is buried in this quandary? Or what if that same something lies not even in loving myself, but in granting forgiveness to the things I can’t control?

The singer’s voice drops to a warble, fades to a hum, then disappears. All that’s left is a guitar, its frets creaking, its strings jangling, its melody telling a tale about letting go.