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The freeness of the school parking lot was undeniable. It waited, at all times, just beyond metal doors. Immediately outside, the pavement was marked with faded yellow paint. Beyond it, a gravel lot for overflow. Each spot was numbered. If you were lucky enough to have a car, you got your first piece of real estate along with it.
While I was in class, my maroon Plymouth Acclaim patiently anticipated my return. Cars always do that. This sentiment once brought me to tears. In a life where not everyone I’ve met has been reliable, at least I know I can go sit in my car.
Exiting the building during school hours without signing out was forbidden. Later in high school we did it anyway, just to sit in our cars and have a cigarette. Just to feel unburdened by expectations for ten minutes.
My one close friend and I took turns hosting our secret lunch outings. Both of our sedans welcomed us happily into their dusty interiors. Mine, a hand-me-down from my grandpa. Hers, a hand-me-down from her brother. There’d be books and CDs in the backseat, half-full coffee cups in the drink holders and wrappers on the floor. In my car, the ceiling’s headliner drooped so far that it caressed the tops of our heads while we sat.
To have started smoking in high school now feels a touch devastating. Not just because of health factors, but because it shows how desperate I was to feel free. Due to insecurities at school and elsewhere, I constantly felt compelled to prove I had a life full of experience beyond wherever I was. Cigarettes always gave you somewhere else to be.
It wasn’t the schooling that made me feel trapped. More so the space, the people, and the social norms. Back inside the school building for my afternoon classes, I would happily participate with the lessons. When in junior year my English teacher required 20 minutes of reading at the start of class, I liked the concept but didn’t know how to select a book out of nowhere. She recommended Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, because she knew I was eager to galavant about. She was observant like that.
My friend and I shared the same schedule, so when the final bell rang we wasted no time. We returned to our reserved parking spaces and tossed books and bags into back seats. Sometimes we could only hang out briefly before one of us had to go to work. Other times we had the evenings to ourselves. We were free to linger in between tasks and decisions.
“Decide” was one of the first words I looked up when I learned about etymology. Back then I had lots of energy and attention and no idea where to channel it. Sometimes I’d zone in on a single word. I’d repeat it out lout to feel my tongue shape it, and copy down its definition and etymology. It would be just as out of context and aimless as I felt, no clear purpose to fill.
Decide shares a root, of course, with homicide, but also scissors, chisel, and precision. I noted this and considered how in making a decision we have to cut away every other possibility. Perhaps we kill their potential all together. That perspective startled me, and also pinpointed why it was that decision making felt so impossible.
One thing that alleviated the pressure of that impossibility was floating in liminal spaces. The accessible ambiguity of a car appealed to me. When you were parked, it was never outright clear whether you were somewhere or nowhere, because you could always drive away.
It’s not unusual for a high schooler to go driving. That demographic wants to feel independent. A car is a safe place to be alone. And driving is a good way to clear the mind.
Driving aimlessly feels like slipping outside of time — even more so when the drive is through a series of monotonous flat country roads. Our county high school and its liberating parking lot sat at a flat intersection, much like many others in that county. All we had to do was turn right and we’d be cruising away from city limits.
The detail that completed our vague travel — and this nostalgic teen montage — was the music. Both of us had CD players in our cars. Mine was installed by a Best Buy employee as a 16th birthday gift from my parents.
We had our go-to bands of the era: of Montreal, The Flaming Lips, Devendra Banhart, and Sonic Youth. Their album Rather Ripped came out the summer before our junior year, and burnt copies lived in both of our CD books. Our favorite songs were the ones with Kim Gordon on vocals. Her melodies mimicked those on guitar, and together they formed an edgy and affecting soundtrack to our drives.
Windows down and volume up, I gathered a sense of space and opportunity from the flat horizons and committed it to memory. Tomorrow we’d be required to return to routine. I would need this perspective to carry me through the morning until lunchtime, until the moment I could escape again.
Thank you for reading! Have any feedback for me? I’d love to hear it — so much that I created this form just for that purpose.
I love your writing, your ability to look inside yourself, look inside your memories and find the words to share the experience. You make it possible for me to be in your life, in your inner world, in what seems like real time, when I usually wasn't able to be there with you when it was actually happening. I wish you would bind your disco diaries into a book. I'd buy it. Great writing.