Driving

A couple years ago Caleb took me on a date (I know shocker right? We DATED!). He'd told me to dress nice and took me to the Macaroni Grill where he surprised me with tickets to see Jerry Seinfeld's stand up show in Salt Lake. I was really excited, I'd heard so many great things about it, and really, who doesn't love Jerry Seinfeld? Hmm? That's what I thought.

(Oh! Funny story! Totally beside the point, but funny nonetheless. We walked out of the restaurant and ran into a girl we'd both gone to high school. She got married three months after graduating, and was rather smug about it. She struck up small talk, and soon we all realized we were going to the second showing of the night, and she'd just been to the first. "Well look at you two, tryin' to be all fancy!", she'd exclaimed. Very HA HA. Very.)

Anyway.

The show was fabulous of course, but one bit struck a cord with me. I can't even remember what he was getting at, but he said something about how funny it was that sometimes when you're with someone on a hill you imagine pushing them off it, or when you're driving you imagine what it would be like to drive your car off the ledge. Everyone was laughing of course, as however he'd put it was hilarious. I was laughing too, really hard. Very hard. Maybe a little TOO hard. Okay, I was laughing so hard I had tears streaming down my cheeks. It was like he'd traveled to the very inner recesses of my brain and just voiced them for all to hear. Okay, not the pushing-someone-off-a-ledge thing, but the driving thing. Back home there was a street near my house with a ravine off the side, and I'd drive by and wonder what it would be like to turn that wheel JUST a little bit.....I'd think about what it would look like, the landscape falling in the frame of the windshield. What it would sound like, the gate breaking, the metal scraping against the sides of the concrete slab. By this time I'd be a few blocks away before I'd finally snap back to reality. Sometimes I think about it when I'm sitting at one of those "T" intersections, what it would be like to NOT turn that wheel, to keep driving forward into the tree...bush...house...what it would feel like to hit that, to watch my headlights become more and more focused until they were two little dots of light.

I'm not quite sure why I do this, I've never actually thought I was going to do it. It's more like a musing, a fantasy. If I'm alone I sometimes continue with the trance, wondering what would happen afterward, would someone stop? Would I sit there in silence until I called someone? Would I get hurt? Need to see a doctor, or go to the hospital? Would it change the way I viewed the world? Would I look back on those few fleeting moments and divide my life into before the crash and after the crash?

I'm not even quite sure where I'm going with this, I have no direction, no point to make. Chock it up as a random confession, another tick to add to my growing list. Figuring myself out by turning out my insides.