This is something about us that's lingered for a while. There's something about road trips that have touched us in an almost spiritual way. With a note of irony, this set in due to the last one we went on, and we haven't had a chance to do any since.
2017 was the year we left the states. We'd been yet-undiagnosed for our bipolar and PTSD, and minus medication every emotion we felt was as big as the world. We'd internalized so much fear that all we could think to do is run, and this is where it lead.
Importing a vehicle is sketch. We're still not sure if we understood the paperwork to this day, but by all we got from it the US government was going to take ownership of our car if we didn't make it to the border in time.
We were in Maryland, the middle of the east coast. We had to make it to Vancouver, which is of course considerably west and also a good deal north of there.
Dear friends of ours had made a move from Pittsburgh to Seattle about a week prior to when we were going. They offered their route, and we took it. Five days start to finish, just as they'd done. Five days to get across the country, or we lose our car.
Of course, they did it by trading off drivers. We were alone.
We hid ourselves in a hoodie and sweatpants, paranoid-fearful that someone was going to hold our identity against us. We lived on meal bars and bottled water and energy drinks, piled in bulk packages on the passenger seat. When we had to piss, we did it off the side of the road. We only got gas as we absolutely had to. Travel was as early as we could manage each day, given we were chaining 12-13 hour stretches of road and wanted to give ourselves enough time to sleep.
We had friends queued up in a discord server, the idea that they could be along on the journey, check in and cheer us on and keep us focused. But, of course, the connection kept keeling over, and eventually we agreed there wasn't much of a point.
A day or two after that is where it sets in.
What started as fear started to fade as we realized how alone we were. Not a bad kind of alone, just... empty interstates in the small hours. Barely any souls, any place we passed by between the hotels.
This comes to a head one night, somewhere in the midwest. It's 2 am, and the road climbs into the mountains. The night is dark. We've never seen a darker night. It's a total VOID anywhere outside our headlights, and the road keeps climbing. It gets noticeably colder.
The road starts to dip and rise, small hills of asphalt. One moment the high beams show nothing but the world, and the next they point to the sky, tunneling into the infinite black. A rhythm, endless, stretching on and on.
I don't think there was - or will be - a moment in our life that will ever be that utterly alone again. Lost in the black, not another soul in sight on the roads. Dip, rise. Dip, rise.
Maybe it was dissociation or fear or exhaustion. Maybe it was just the time of night. But then, absolutely as we've ever felt it, we were alone and somewhere other than real.
Something in that stretch of night lingered with us. It's still there. And gods, do we still hunger for it.
And that's where the feeling lies.