Drive All Night

It’s dark, the heat isn’t working, and the woman’s toes have gone numb. A gray sweater hangs loosely across her shoulders, the hem frayed and bottom two buttons missing. There’s a hole in the sleeve of her right arm. With hands clad in woolen mittens, the woman grips the steering wheel, trying to steady her shaking hands. It doesn’t work and her fingers tip tap against the silence of the night. Swirling gray clouds form and then vanish with each small breath she takes.

The clock on the dashboard reads 11:46, but it's broken and has said the same thing for weeks. Last the woman checked her calendar, it was January 3rd, but that was at least two days ago. She doesn’t have much of a need for that date these days, and even less of one for the time. In fact, she wouldn’t even have known it was Christmas if not for the flyer left on her door the day after the big day. “Stop in for our post-Christmas sales!” it read in bold red lettering. She threw it in the trash.

As the woman thinks about it now, she realizes it had been a white Christmas. Two feet of snow on the ground, enveloping the whole world in pure white. Most would call it beautiful, but the woman thought of it only as an inconvenience. She hasn’t owed a pair of waterproof boots in years and even the short trek from the door to her car had left her feet soaked through. She hates the feeling of wet socks.

The woman watches the scenery blur by out of the corner of her eye as she drives. The freeway is deserted, as it has been for the past two hours, and woods shelter the road on either side. The trees are bare, like stick people tangled in their own limbs, and though she’s driving the woman turns her head to weave her eyes in and out of the empty space between trunks.

The snow from Christmas has almost vanished by now. All that remains are towering mountains on the side of the road, speckled with the browns and grays of passing traffic. The woman decides she likes snow better when it’s tainted and not so picturesque and perfect. She determined a long time ago that perfection unsettles her. She doesn’t like to think about why.

In truth, the woman prefers not to think about anything meaningful at all. She allows her mind to wander however it likes, only putting an end to its travels when it uncovers a secret she has tried so very hard to protect. Things are easier that way.

Miles later, the clock still reads 11:46. The woman should be tired, but, as always, she isn’t. She doesn’t get tired anymore, not after the hundreds of sleepless nights that haunt her past. If anything, the dead of the night is the only time she’s really alive. The still, the quiet, and the nothingness leave her with a numbness that she relishes more than anything. At times like this, one could almost call her content. Almost, but not quite.

It starts to snow. The snowflakes dance in and out of view, crisscrossing through the beams of light emitted by the cars headlights. They dot the windshield like little freckles, and the woman reaches to turn on the windshield wipers, but stops. Nothing should interrupt the placidity of the dark night. She watches silently as the snowflakes cover more and more of her view, until the real world seems like only a bad dream.

Snow, she decides, is not bad at all. It covers the scars you wish to hide and paints you a new world.

For the first time that night the woman’s hands cease to shake. She releases the steering wheel from here firm grip, and wiggles her fingers. Drawing her sweater around her small body, she slowly reclines into her seat, like she’s afraid leaning too far with break the spell and return her to the world she came from. A world she never wants to return to.

She’s found it, she thinks, the place where nothing matters. Staring into the white nothingness, her lips turn up at the corners, and the wrinkles in her forehead become just a bit less pronounced.

The woman smiles for the first time in four years, and it’s the most amazing feeling she’s ever experienced.

But then she remembers. She remembers and her lips turn down and her forehead creases and she curses herself for being so unbelievably stupid. How many times had he told her not to give up? Not to forget, no matter what? Now’s she’s failed, and she’s sorry, so sorry.

The woman knows she must leave this land where the sky is white and her emotions are numb. Where her pain is gone and her problems drift away like litter on the sidewalk. She knows she can’t give in now, not after the years of torture she’s already had to endure to prevent this. So she lifts her head and reaches for the steering wheel again. It’s hard, so astonishingly hard, but she grips ones hand around the wheel and stretches towards the windshield wiper button with the other.

She presses it and looks up to see the wipers begin to struggle against the layer of snow that has gathered atop her windshield. She has enough time to scold herself again for her mistake before it happens. A crash, a bang, a crunch, and then quiet. So much quiet, and were it minutes, even seconds earlier, the woman would have been pleased. She would have been content to lay there and let the still wrap around her, take away her troubles and tuck her into bed.

The quiet suffocates her now, clawing at her neck and around her limbs, an invisible beast not unlike the one she’s be combating nearly her whole life.

She wants it gone more than anything she’s ever wanted and so she fights the hardest she has ever fought.

She wants to scream, to cry, to do anything that will break the awful spell, but whenever she tries to shout nothing happens. And she can’t breathe, can’t breathe, and she’s trapped by this monster that’s been latched onto her for ages. Her heart screams so loud she’s sure even he can hear it, but it’s still so, so quiet.

And then a whisper, barely more than a breath, escapes her lips.

“Stop.”

That one word, that one syllable, is all it takes to ignite her. Hope bursts through her body and the claws around her neck become cotton not iron, the hold the world has on her becoming as flimsy and the sweater wrapped around her shoulders.

The words pour out now, an incoherent mess that sounds like nothing to a bystander but means everything to the woman. “Stop, I’m sorry, my fault, it’s better, I’m sorry, let go, I did it, I’m sorry”. With each and every word, the woman crawls out of the grave she’s been digging for herself every day for years, and into the world she now wants to belong to.

Tears stream down her face as she reaches into her pocket, grasps her cell phone, and dials the three numbers that will be the start of her new life. When the person on the other side answers, the woman has only enough energy to whisper “I did it,” before the phone slips for her hands and tumbles out of view.

The woman doesn’t know what she will do now, doesn’t know where to begin to rebuild the mess of a life she is leading. Really, she barely knows anything at all. The only thing she is sure of is that she is never, ever going back to that dark and lonely place she once thought was where she belonged.

The woman sighs and reclines into her seat again. This time, however, it does not signify the end of a life, but rather the start of a whole new one.