Travel

Not having a car sucks.

Check that: Not having a functioning car sucks. The lack of a car when one is used to going anywhere one wants at the drop of one's hat (okay, I'll stop) sucks.

Here's the good in this situation: No need to set aside a few bucks to put gas in the car. I live less than 10 minutes from King V and Queen S and Dad willingly picks me up and drops me off. He picked me up earlier today so I could do some work for him. To give him a break from being my personal chauffeur, I'm staying here tonight. On a twin bed. With goose-down-pokey-in-the-face pillows. Across the hall from my parents. Whom I hope do not have Friday night sex.

Now that my eyes are bleeding, let's get back to travel, shall we?

I suppose I could be really profound and say that being a passenger has given me the chance to really focus on the beauty around me. I do love all the things I notice that I don't ordinarily see when I'm chugging by in The Hoopty. Down the street from my parents' house, there are huge houses with huge lawns, decorated with tiny lights and grinning plastic pumpkins. Dad and I talk about the former one-way street that is now bi-directional. We discuss the mural that adorns the side of a neighborhood cafe. We get as far as the bridge a few blocks from my house and I find myself wishing I lived just a little further away. I am spirited home practically before I can get comfortable. I say thanks, climb out of the ever-so-small green Prius my parents own, and listen for the car's barely perceptible hum as Dad drives away.

He waits until I am on the porch before he leaves. I flip on the porch light momentarily so he knows I am safe inside.

In my apartment, things seem stagnant. Every day, I see a French version of a Diet Coke can I brought home from our family's travels to France and England when I was 20. How is it possible that I haven't been overseas in 19 years? I think about the trip I was going to take to England with some friends back in 1998, a few months before their father's sudden death. We were going to make the trip and then take a train to Scotland to buy sweaters. We also thought about flying to Australia and taking the train across the country. I still remember our shock when we realized the continent is much, much bigger than we realized. I think about the geography of our friendship and how very much things changed after their dad was gone.

I think about 2008 and the trip I was going to take with college friends the next year. We were going to go somewhere overseas, although I can't remember where anymore. It was a pipe dream trip -- the kind of vacation you excitedly talk about over too much wine one night, wanting to get away from school or work or whatever mire we were slogging through then. Or maybe I'm just speaking for myself.

All too well, I remember the end of 2008, how the financial collapse signaled the end of my job with King V's company. After my last day, I was going to travel the states in the then-reliable Hoopty. I made it as far as St. Louis before I lost my mind. Two hours into the trip, I was more bored than I thought possible. Half an hour outside the city, the rain became too heavy for my non-functioning windshield wipers and I had to pull off the road. I wondered how traveling musicians and poets put up with the endless highways, the same songs on the same CDs, the need to stop for gas and stretching while simultaneously fighting the urge to keep going, keep going, keep going.

My mind is always swirling somewhere else, it seems. Things will be better when I move to [city name] and I start working for [company name]. I will meet a lovely woman and begin dating. We will fall in love and get married, if only in a small backyard ceremony with folding chairs and lots of balloons. Things will be better, I think, when I am not here. My life is going to start -- really start -- when I'm not in this apartment, driving this car, looking for a job I don't entirely want but need. Too often I find myself fighting instead of surrendering.

Someday I will move beyond this place where I feel stationed like a passenger without a passport. I will climb aboard a plane headed for Spain, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Scotland, or France. I will pack the car for a road trip or drag an impossible carry-on onto a train. Someday I will feel myself moving forward again, whether I'm winging my way around the world or simply puttering across the city in my sweet, old car.