Freedom
Music in the car, to me, will always mean freedom. It was my escape whenever I got shoved into the back of my dad’s Chevy Blazer and taken on yet another road trip. When I got my license and got my mom’s car, I used my meager savings to have a CD player installed. It didn’t matter that all I was doing was driving around my dopey town or that the only places to go were Starbucks, the beach, or the mall. Listening to music was all I knew how to do in the car, all I wanted to do, and all these years later, it’s all I want to do still. Don’t put me on the phone while driving—I’ll drive into a tree. No podcasts, no audiobooks. My brain isn’t wired for that. Whether the drive is 20 minutes or 20 hours, I want music or I want conversation with whoever I’m in the car with, and I want nothing else. Twenty years ago, my best friend and I took a road trip to the Grand Canyon. I had come back from my first year of college full of bravado from having survived an East Coast winter and eight months 3,000 miles from home. I’m sure I was the one who suggested the adventure, though I doubt I had to talk her into it. We took her car, took our cameras, took our cell phones with the pull-out antennae, and loaded the center console with CDs and Skittles. We drove out of California and onto the long, flat, endless highways of Arizona where the speed limit was something like 80 because what would anyone run into out there? I had just finished a semester of nothing but English and writing classes, and I’d gotten the worst grades of my academic career. I was a mere month away from finally being noticed by the boy I’d been in love with since 16 and three months away from getting my heart truly and thoroughly broken. I was all restlessness and sharp edges, deathly uncomfortable in my own skin, and trying as hard as I could, as fast as I could, to become who I would be, so I could get away from who I was. What did we listen to on that drive? I could guess, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. Whatever it was, I am sure it fed into the dream that we really could leave places and parts of ourselves behind.