I creep around as if I’m going to wake a baby or, worse, its tyrant father.
I’ve very little freedom as I muster enough energy to complete another day.
My freedom comes when I drive, for those brief cessations when I must answer to no one. It’s nearly as though I disappear, becoming just another moving steel object, unnoticed, unbothered, spoken to by no one.
You would think that owning (nay, making payments on) a bright orange Jeep would mean never blending in. People have told me that they’ve passed me on the interstate, waving, honking, only to have me blatantly ignore them. Perhaps I’m just trying to become fewer atoms, to be so ordinary that I am simply and wonderfully ignored.
I crave those moments when I can act out my own reality, just being. Most times, I don’t even have the radio on. I’ve always quite relished the bland and uniform melody of tires meeting pavement. I’ve become quite attuned to the nuances of my vehicles in time. Where others would detect nothing, I can hear the beginnings of potential problems. But I’m no mechanic. And even they look and listen to me as if I have a condiment on my face.
Diary of a Nearly Nobody 