Every time I get on the road, I can picture my death. I see my car slamming into the back of one that suddenly stops. Another vehicle from behind unable to avoid us, sandwiches my car. The loud crunch and screech of metal pressing into metal as it crushes around my body. The windows shattering and spraying my face with a million tiny shards of glass that, even if I survived, would never be fully removed. The impact of my head on the steering wheel as my skull breaks inwards between my eyebrows and my mind shuts down for good. If the brain does stay alive for moments after death like so many people think it does, mine would have the final thought, “so this is what it’s like to be mashed potato.”
But let’s say I just narrowly avoid the car that slams its brakes ahead of me. I see myself swerve to the right, into the shoulder, like they teach everyone to do. The shoulder is there for that. For safety. Whether it be your own safety or the emergency vehicles flying down the road for someone else’s safety. But everyone knows that the shoulder of I-695 is the least safe place. As I drive the daily routine, I count all the tire hubs, the tires themselves, the scraps of fender left behind from other unseen car crashes, the trail of blood from animal carcasses that were dragged for miles before a semi-truck turned its insides soupy enough to dislodge. One time I even saw a sofa. A full sofa just sitting in the shoulder, inches from those in the far lane. Everyone knows the shoulder of I-695 is the least safe place.
So, let’s say I do just narrowly avoid the car that slams its brakes ahead of me. By instinct, I see myself swerve into the shoulder lane only to plow into a dining set. The table goes through my windshield, busting into my jaw, pinching the nerve in the back of my head as my skull jerks downwards from the impact. If I do survive a table to the face, I’ll only be paralyzed from the neck down and missing the jaw that shattered into a million tiny pieces. Or, let’s say there is no table. Let’s say there is no unfortunate obstacle and by the grace of whatever higher being there is, it is the safest part of the unsafe shoulder along the entire road. I see myself skid into the gravel of that emergency lane, but in my panicked state, I overcompensate, I steer too far, the tires lose traction, another motion of overcompensation to straighten out, more traction loss, when suddenly wham — nose first into the cement barrier wall.
When you’re driving alone on the long stretch of highway, your mind tends to wander. And when the mind wanders, you’re reminded of your own mortality. And when you’re reminded of your own mortality, you think about death. And when you think about death, those impulses might just have a tendency to take over. You feel yourself subtly moving the steering wheel just enough to the outside of the lane for a close call as if you’re wanting it to happen. You’re calling the crash to you. You want to know what those final blips of thought might be like. You can leave all the normal problems behind. When you give a mouse a cookie, it inevitably leads to your death. A small glimmer of hope that can come from such tragedy is that the crash will be gruesome enough to make it into the papers or on the news or shared through endless hyperlinks of social media; immortalized in the same way that people immortalize Lou Gehrig or Typhoid Mary or Amber of the AMBER Alert, these people whose situations were so bad that you immediately associate a name with any repeat offender while you use their names as a descriptor more than an identifier. Through destruction, there is rebirth. From negativity can come evolution. People spend so much time online trying to become the next trend, the next pop star, the next cultural phenomenon, not realizing you can just as easily achieve that fame by dying a gruesome death or getting maimed.
I’m still in the car, mindlessly driving from point A to point B, then after however much time, from point B back to point A. Over two hours there and back each day like so many others. I look around and see those faceless metal boxes, all operated by their anonymous NPCs, each one believing that they are the main characters in their own story, but knowing they aren’t the main characters in anyone else’s. I see their daily struggles, the frustrations over money or relationships or bosses giving them strife or their friends never making enough time for them or the medical costs for whatever mysterious ailment or trying in vain to find a new source of happiness once they’ve become numb to the world. Everyone has their own problems. Everyone has their own difficulties that are caused by an outside force. Not to mention the problems of internal pressure. But for the most part, it’s that outside force that pulls them into another day in the office, another day on the factory floor.
I see how no one is truly doing what they want to do. That their lives, their very identities are created by something else in a chain reaction. Are they themselves, or are they who someone else before has made them become?
So much of our stress comes from the comforts of the modern world. From the things we buy or want to buy. The luxuries we have or want to have. The need to work to pay for a place to live and food to eat. We don’t live in a world of constant daily threat and yet, our internal states are constantly threatened by the mundanity of life, the struggles of bureaucracy, the paper trail of necessary expenses. We aren’t fighting with makeshift weapons, we aren’t hunting for our food, we aren’t breathing toxic fumes or bathing in fallout, we aren’t in an arid wasteland without any access to resources. We live in a privileged world and yet so many are not privileged. And even those who are privileged are unhappy because they’ve been forced to struggle for so long for a moment of rest.
Then again, there are those who are spoiled. How many times in your life have you screamed at someone driving slower than you, someone who might be completely terrified behind the wheel and are just trying to stay calm? How many times in the past year have you been frustrated because the line at Chipotle was too long? How many times in the past month have you pressed “door close” just to stop someone from sharing an elevator with you? How many times in the past week have you been frustrated with your local barista for making your coffee with 2% milk instead of skim milk? How many times today have you thought, “God, I hate my job. God, I hate my life”? And how many times have you relayed those stories to friends and family to feel important? Are these situations necessary to our survival? Do they benefit our lifespans in any way? Are we so bored with the comforts of life that we crave frustration, so much so that we’re willing to create our own misfortunes just for a second of being the main character? A protagonist is the one in the story who faces the most amount of obstacles. The antagonist is the one who creates the most amount of obstacles. But in a life of comfort when there is no antagonist, we make one out of everyone and everything around us.
My tires make their tell-tale rumbling noise as they touch the edge of the right lane. I must be drifting again. These intrusive thoughts are becoming intrusive impulses are becoming intrusive actions against my own will. I think to myself, “would it be so bad to just accidentally let the wheel slip into the next lane?” I loosen my grip for just a moment. I close my eyes and see all the antagonists I’ve created for myself, all the obstacles of my comfortable life. The rumble of the hazard line grows louder. I see all unnecessary frustrations and I see them disappear. I see the peace of freedom. The lack of any tension. What’s the difference between highway hypnosis and highway meditation? The warning beep of my car’s lane detector gets faster. I can tell the tire catches something by how the wheel suddenly jerks.
Then I wait for the crash.
And I see my death.