Past and Future Choices

Someone who's been around a lot longer than she should have been, thinking about the change in transportation over her life.

I held the pedal down gently with my foot, still fascinated by the force propelling me forward at previously unheard of speeds. Some times I missed horses. I missed the time it took to get to places, the time to think about your life, your choices, both past and future. Present choices didn't really matter much... once the choice had been made, there wasn't usually much you could do about it.

But driving these cars... you had to watch for other cars. You were going at speeds so fast that said car would disintegrate the second you messed up. Or someone else messed up. Or a particular stroke of fate decided to mess you up of it's own volition, without consideration of your thoughts on the subject.

At least horses were a little easier... if they fell and hurt themselves, or you, for that matter, there were no explosions, no painful metal tangles to be broken out of with mechanical jaws. Even if they decided to throw you, you might land hard, get up and chase the horse down and hit it on the head as punishment. Then you got back on. A car couldn't consciously decide to throw you, but you could do something to make it to, and when that happened, you generally didn't get to get back up and hit it in the face, due to your body being in multiple places at once.

Cars could be a little more comfortable, at times, but there was this nagging pain that always started in the hips and worked down to the knees. At least on a horse, you could get off and walk it down the road for a bit, until your legs started to regain their feeling. Anyone saw you walking a car down the side of the highway, you'd probably be arrested and tested for drugs. Or someone would hit you out of spite. Or fate would intervene again, whether you wanted it to or not, resulting in a ten-car pileup and a nuclear explosion or two.

And the speed. It was exhilarating, when you didn't think of how many pieces of the human body could be separated from the main, without you actually dying. And all of the others nearby. Right now, I could look to the left and there were five more cars directly in line with me. I looked in my mirror. Countless cars, five wide. The same in front. When it was horses and carts, you'd be lucky to see a few passersby going the opposite direction, and having someone pass you at speeds nearly double yours probably would have scared me half to death and caused the horses to spook and either collapse or try to thrown the cart. Now I just kind of accepted it and moved on.
I remember when cars first started off, too. The horses moved faster than they. If a car hit a person, it was always the car's driver's fault. No matter what had happened. Now, though...

Now everything was just confusing. Don't be an aggressive driver. But you can't go above the speed limit. But not keeping up with traffic is considered aggressive driving. But they're going way above the speed limit. But you know that a policeman can't single one person out of a crowd of speeders without good reason. And, unless he was already speeding with the group, there would be no way he could catch up with whomever it was that he had singled out.

Not once back in the day had I heard about a high-speed chase between a mounted soldier/police officer and a runaway/stolen wagon. It just... wouldn't work. Mainly due to the lack of paved road. Turn this road into a road like back in the day, and everyone would go the speed limit of 65 mph, or slower, depending on conditions. Now, most of us were rocketing along at 90 mph.

A bug died on my windshield.

I frowned, keeping my eyes on the brake light and turn lights of those ahead of, beside, and just generally around me.

I wanted to go back.

Maybe I would make it my job to make everything go back....

But right now there was a particularly aggressive Volkswagen swerving in and out of lanes with no use of his turn signals.

It was painted a garish orange.  

Author's Note

Just let me know how it was. I'm trying to work on my flow of thought. I think faster than I can type, so I tend to... well, forget what I'm writing... did I do okay?