Twenty Minutes

May twenty-first. I am thirty-two years old and I drove a car alone today for the first time for longer than it takes to pull out of a parking space and immediately panic back in.

This requires some context. I learned the mechanics years ago, I know how a car works, technically. But I have spent the better part of my adult life in a city where you don't need one, and the few times I've been behind the wheel in the last decade it's been a brief, white-knuckled trip across a mostly empty lot with someone in the passenger seat ready to intervene. Today there was no one in the passenger seat. Today I took a car, borrowed, with permission, very clearly communicated insurance implications, out onto a real street and drove it in a loop for twenty minutes through a neighborhood I did not know.

I had a route planned. I had looked at it on my phone the night before and again this morning. I knew the turns. What I did not know was how loud the inside of my own head would get in the space between knowing a turn is coming and actually executing the turn. By the time I pulled back into the parking spot I was exhausted in a specific way I haven't been in a while, the kind that comes from sustained, effortful, total attention. My hands were fine. My hands were completely fine. My brain had run a marathon.

The thirty seconds after parking

I sat in the car for a while after I turned the engine off. There is probably a version of this story where I call it triumphant, where I come home and immediately look up the next step. Instead I leaned against the car outside for a minute and looked at the trees and felt tired in a way that was also, quietly, something else. A first. A real one. The kind that doesn't announce itself until you're already on the other side of it.

Out of the car. Still processing.