God's Highway

He can't see me anymore.

It’s in that final 60-mile stretch that she finally breaks from the highway hypnosis that consumed her for hundreds of miles earlier. Careening down the dark empty highway 20 above the speed limit. If she were to lose control of the vehicle, she could just so easily lose everything. But she’s in control. She rolls the windows down and the air beats against her pale, bare skin. Not too cold; not too hot. It’s late summer �" August �" and the full Moon is dangling above the highway and it’s brighter than any streetlamp.  

 

Maybe she had been driving too long. Her thoughts had left her long ago. The only thing she can see now is darkness, but mere hours before, she could see sharp and jagged red rock formations that declined sharply into a sea of green pine. The only thing she could think about was driving. Driving. Driving to what?; nothing in particular; Driving from what?; well.  

 

The highway exit sign is illuminated by a single bright lamp on the side of the road. It was a number she had engraved in her mind when she determined this to be her next stop for the night. But why stop?  

 

If she kept driving, then what? She was not tired yet; she had been driving for nearly 14 hours, but she had yet to feel the fatigue from sitting behind a wheel and staring at open road for forever. What was another 10 miles? 20? 30? 

 

The faster and further away she got, the better.  

 

Because no one knew her when she was on the road. Sitting in the driver’s seat of a generic, gray car. It’s small, small enough to maneuver but just sizable enough to live out of for days �" weeks �" months �" at a time. No one could get a good look at her out here, whether they caught a glimpse of her in their rearview mirrors or they stared just long enough at her as she passed them by at lightspeed. No; no one knew who she was on the road, and she had been on the road for days.  

 

There was no clear plan. No clear destination. She lost track a long time ago which cardinal direction she had meant to stick to. She’s sure she started to go east, then she found herself going north; at some point she’s sure she turned around and begun going south and now she’s almost dead certain she’s going west or something like it. Every time she sees water �" coastline �" she pauses for only a moment to breath it in and then turns around and goes in the exact opposite direction. 

 

She does not know what day it is, or for how long she’s been out here for. She doesn’t remember the last time she genuinely spoke with someone, about life, fears, wants, desires. The only voices she’s had on this journey have been the static as it comes through the radio; podcasts she downloads at rest stops with WiFi; the philosophical discussions she and herself have had between one another. None of which came to any impactful conclusion.  

 

Was there even a worth conclusion to be had? She wasn’t sure. The longer she spent with herself, the more sense everything seemed to make. That when there wasn’t the road, there was nothing. The road never truly seemed to end but she could do and go wherever she wanted. She had seen and heard and smelled and tasted so many different things that her heart could no longer yearn for a permanent home; her home was whichever direction she felt like she needed to go.  

 

All that was left now was the road. It didn’t matter the whats or the whos she left behind when she started to drive. They were at the back of her mind now, where they belonged. They were locked away in a vault, and she had lost the key somewhere in Wyoming �" or Kansas, whichever she had been to first. Or maybe she had dropped it in the last ocean she saw. Which one had it been...? 

 

It was funny to her that no matter where she went the night sky looked different. In some places, it was purple and pink and yellow and orange; in others, pitch black or polluted by the lights of the nearby metropolis’; and in others, it was almost as if God had poked a million tiny holes in the deep blue construction paper that had domed itself over the entire world.  

 

She was not sure which one she preferred more. To see so many colors in the night sky seemed to be most hopeful; as if she were to follow them, she would wind up somewhere equally as beautiful and colorful �" somewhere where she could feel something that the night sky made her feel. When the sky was dark, it was abysmal and hopeless. It seemed to have no definitive conclusion as it stretched on infinitely. And yet she was determined to wait it out until the sun made its reappearance; those nights were the ones when she was the most stubborn; they were when she drove the longest, because she knew it was necessary to laugh in defiance in the face of the sun.  

 

But when there were stars in the sky, she could only stop. She could only pull off to the side of the road and park there indefinitely, with the sunroof open and the driver’s seat reclined all the way back, so she was lying perfectly flat. Then, she would stare right back at God, unwavering. And He knew that he could not do anything to shake her, because when they looked each other right in the eyes like that, she knew all His deepest darkest secrets. He knew that she knew that He would watch and do absolutely nothing, because He had watched and done absolutely nothing for her entire life.  

 

God respected her for her defiance. And when she defied Him, she was her most powerful.  

 

And so, God would watch until he could no longer do so, and then He would leave, respectfully, and she would continue, if not with equal respect. And then they would meet again, some days later, in a different place in the world. They would both look slightly different to one another, but they would never once fail to recognize one another.  

 

And she would continue for miles without seeing God.  

 

She would not speak to God. She had nothing to say to Him. And He understood that, more now than before.  

 

When she saw the Sun, it was different. She relied more on the Sun than on anything else, and more often than not was let down. The Sun would give her light, but It would obstruct Itself from her view because It was mortified that It no longer had her respect when It broke the night sky. The Sun knew that It was ugly and colorless until it was no longer convenient for Itself and when the night sky once did reveal Herself, it was Her �" not It �" that painted the skies a different color, to celebrate the coming of the Night and the going away of the Sun.  

 

Defiant she was, in the face of the Sun.  

 

And though her respect for It waned day in and day out, she continued to push forward, along that twisted highway. From Seattle to Chicago to New Orleans to New York to Los Angeles to Houston and back again. No matter how clear It had made Itself to be against her from the very start, she defied It.  

 

And so, when she narrowed in on her exit, with God watching, she kept driving. She kept driving for a hundred miles more, until she felt that there was truly no one left going in the same direction as her.  

 

There was a small sandy drive-off that appeared to lead her up a mountain. She followed the path up and up until she came to a ledge and she was surprised that she was the only one up there because it was the perfect spot to look out over the lands that seemed to stretch for eons in front of her. And with the Moon’s light, it had become all so very clear to her.  

 

She was at the edge of a desert now. It had been flat for hundreds of miles and yet, this ledge was here. She parked her faithful steed and crawled up on top through the sunroof. And as she did, the first flash ripped across the sky and she was stunned. Was God really trying to fight back tonight? 

 

There came another flash. Off in the distance, she could see even more flashes. Lightning. And she began to laugh. She laughed so loud that she was sure people hundreds of miles up and down the highway could hear her. God watched her laugh, and he laughed along with her. She laughed until tears streamed from her face and God kept laughing. He had painted the lightning across the skies for her. And she fell asleep laughing.  

 

She was only awoken by crystal drops of rain as they fell onto her bare skin. The sun had yet to make Its appearance, and after she had spent so much time with God the night before, she was not at all surprised.  

 

As she began to drive back down the way she came, the rain became heavier. She watched as the soft, silk, white desert sands began turning to mush and brown and while there was a part of her that longed to be a part of it, she knew that there was no time, and she must continue.  

 

And continue she did. The rain picked up and so did the traffic; trucks of all sizes carrying sizable cargos from east to west. She thought of the truck stops she had stumbled across since she’d been on the road. They existed in their own world; a single building so far displaced from anything else that it was somehow a city of its own. It was like an island in the middle of nowhere; she had spent a night there and showered there and had gotten mixed looks from greasy and groomed older truckers. Maybe it was the outfit she had worn �" a pink shirt with her old school’s logo, a pair of black jeans, and combat boots �" that made them swoon and stare.  

 

She had remembered what the sky had looked like when she had finally been able to make it back to her own car. Because God had been watching. 

 

Now, where was God? He was no longer watching; the sky was pitch black and she could barely make out the shapes of the trucks as they sped past her confidently through the rain. For a brief moment, she yearned for the Sun, but she quickly bit back her pride, realizing that she would lose if she allowed It to see her in this state.  

 

So she kept going. The harder she pressed on the gas the harder the rain seemed to fall around her. She could feel the stares of drivers as she slowly began to overtake them. The honking of disgruntled, sleep-deprived truckers as they were yet again reminded of how they had put themselves in a situation that they could hardly get out of, and somehow, she was the one who was free to zip and zoom and weave throughout as she so desired and there was no one who could stop her because what she was doing held no weight to the language of the road.  

 

She thought of stopping once or twice when the rain became suddenly became too heavy to see through, but she refused to let the Sun win. And so, she kept going, and when the Sun finally did make an appearance some time later, It was impressed, for once.  

 

But oh, the victory was short lived. As she crossed the intersection, a car, identical to hers �" gray, and small and with one driver at its wheel �" lost control of itself. The Sun had won against him.  

 

She felt no fear. And as the car came flying at her out of nowhere, she found herself reveling in the pain it caused. It was the first real thing she had felt in her life. The sensation of dying �" of metal scraping against metal so hard it was tearing the flesh right off her bones and her bones were being crushed and shattered into a million f*****g pieces; glass shards pierced the skin on her face and the leather of the seat snagged and pulled against her clothes and hair until it was all torn off and there was nothing left.  

 

For a brief moment, while she was suspended in midair, she was worried that she was letting the Sun win. But the Sun was ashamed and hid behind the cloud the entire time. It just watched on and did absolutely nothing. And now, she could no longer be mad at God, because He hadn’t been there this time, and there was nothing that He could have done.  

 

And she smiled to herself, because this put her at peace.  

 

God would never watch her again.