If there is no place like home, there is no home like the highway.

Leaving comes with an urgency that sends me half-running to my car. Reverse, radio off, windows down, seatbelt on only after I’m out the driveway and sure that I won’t turn around just to see that it’s still there, that it doesn’t exist in some liminal space I’ve created for myself. That it is in fact real, that the places I leave do not leave themselves. How I can be nowhere, and the difference it doesn’t make.

The highway will show you the difference you don’t make. It will show you trucker motels and gas stations built in the seventies. It will show you the city you always thought to be inspired by and now feel the same as you had before you saw it. It will show you the mountains and the deserts you’ve heard about, and it will humble you to realize that these places just are, with or without their fame. Long after all the kinds of light have faded into a distance, the highway will show you silence and your ability to navigate in a meditative darkness, and you will lose sense of whether it is the highway or yourself that you’ve been driving on autopilot this entire time.

On the highway I am exactly where I want to be: moving, and within an atmosphere whose buoyancy has refined through years of movement. I am going and going and going; the scenery and politics change but the highway stays the same.