Word Count: 374
It happens to all of us I am sure; that feeling of starting the car, pulling out the driveway, and driving without knowing where or why we decide to not go where we’re expected to be.
It was just another Thursday and I was supposed to drive eleven miles to work as I did every weekday. I would go inside the CLI building to the second floor, work, eat lunch bought in their cafeteria, then at five or so, get in my car and drive eleven miles home. It didn’t happen that way, not this Thursday routine day of the week. Instead, I turned right and headed out my driveway in the opposite direction.
My wife and I barely speak to each other. There’s nothing new to discuss. She doesn’t care what my day’s like and I’m bored by what happened at the grocery store. After twenty years and no children, each day is the same as the next, like a room you walk into and nothing is there on the white painted walls. No interesting paintings, no photos of people laughing in front of a twenty-foot waterfall somewhere in a land you can’t get to by car. No couches, no chairs, no pillows to settle down into. You just walk through it and open the next door.
To the next room. Which is exactly the same.
I decided I’d drive until I ran out of gas and I did; then I got out of the car. The air was scented with lilacs though it was now mid-July. The fields were clustered with daisies and Indian Paintbrush. There was a rainbow–full arc–though it hadn’t rained at all. The clouds were all circus animals, elephants and grinning rare white tigers. There was a lady in a sparkly crystal tutu who swung into the arms of a mustachioed man on a trapeze in the sky.
There were no walls, no treelines, no barriers of steel girders that led to the foot of the mountains in the faraway distance. It smelled of firecracker freedom and joy.
I walked into it, into the life of fantasy and what I felt was my real path of thinking. And the next day I did it again.
