The Costs and the Benefits

The sunset lights the marsh on fire for a few select moments, and for several months, those moments strike right as I’m driving home from school. Sometimes, after a long day of school and sports and studying, I choose the long way home, the way that cuts across the marsh, with nothing but soft shoulders and white lines keeping me from the thick marsh mud. I roll my windows down, play my music loud, and drive. 

For my grandfather, driving was the most magical and healing thing you could do. I think of him in moments like those, how he used to race cars, how he used to spend Sundays with his Jeep and his dogs, driving down dirt roads, and listening to the sermon on the radio. I think of how my mother crashed his car when she was my age, and how thin the line is between magic and death. Between feeling the most alive you’ve ever felt and suddenly losing it all.

I think of my best friend when I was younger, and how his dad was always a shell in the corner of the living room. Of how he wasn’t dead, not really, but the part of him that was him died on the side of the road with a wrecked Ford and an irrevocably injured brain. I hated playing at my friend’s house because his house was always sad, always haunted by a slippery road and an honest mistake.

When I was five, I used to swear I’d never drive. When I was fifteen, I drove anyway, but it petrified me to my bones. Every time I got behind the wheel, my hands slipped and slid with sweat on the circle of plastic and leather. 

I don’t know how I went from panicking on the highway to comfortably speeding down that strip of road that cuts through the marsh at sunset. Three years of driving, and now my hands hang casually at five and seven or drape lazily over a solitary twelve. 

Every time I cross that strip of road at sunset, the beauty of the sun over the marsh takes my breath away and I can’t help but ignore the road and watch the beauty of light on water for a stolen few seconds before I catch myself veering off the road. Just a little, but enough for old panic to set in, for my hands to grip the wheel at a safe ten and two, for thoughts of what my death would mean to creep in. 

Sometimes, when I’m driving, I can’t help the thoughts that creep into my mind. At night, going around a tight curve, I imagine what would happen if I veered slightly and collided head-on with cars going the other way. In the early hours of the morning, when I’m driving to the gym before the sun has risen, my brain plays tricks on me. I see people standing in the middle of the road who aren’t there, and I spend the rest of the morning imagining what would happen if they were real and I hit them. I mouth my conversation to the 911 responder, watch a mother crying in my mind’s eye, feel the crushing guilt and pain as if it was real.

I’ve always had an overactive imagination, but while as a kid that meant being convinced my floor was covered in snakes and crocodiles were climbing up my bed, now I imagine what will happen after I die in a car crash. It haunts my nightmares, fills my waking mind, sneaks in behind every thought I think behind the wheel. I’ve had so many dreams about car crashes and thought so in-depth about what would happen if I died in one that I joke with my friends that I don’t think I can die any other way.

Every time I drive alone, I plan a little more what will happen if I suddenly crash. When I drive my little siblings around, I can’t even bear to think about it. I would so much rather die in a crash than live knowing I survived and my baby sister didn’t.

I keep my poems organized because I trust my family and friends to know I would want them published post-mortem. For some reason, cars are the only thing that make me think like this. It seems a contingency to “if I die young” that dieing young will involve a car crash. I guess it’s because it’s the only thing I do on a regular basis with such a high fatality rate. Statistically, the odds are in favor of my paranoia.

I’m not scared of driving, anymore. I probably should be.

I’m a very cautious driver. I drive the speed limit, I use my turn signal, I wait way too long to turn into traffic just to be sure. It frustrates people I drive sometimes, but getting to the destination a few minutes faster, to me, just isn’t worth my mother losing a daughter. It isn’t worth ruining my little sister’s life—I know how much she looks up to me.

It’s a cost-benefit analysis, and no matter how late I’m running, the costs of reckless driving just simply are never worth the benefits.