Drive

There’s something about driving alone late at night, something so relaxing and so illuminating. It’s the only time when I can (and have to) force myself to stay awake while doing nothing for a really long time, nothing except, of course, resting my foot on the gas, keeping my left hand at the bottom of the steering wheel, and staring out into a road. No distractions.

Even though I know my destination, I feel like I’m driving nowhere because I’m not getting there in half an hour, in the next hour, or the next five hours, and the only thing I can see before me is more road heading into a black abyss. This is when I find the time to think and to reflect deeply, real deeply, far more deeply than the amount of reflection I do when I write.

I left my home in NorCal for UCI on the evening of July 4th, of all days. I figured, y’know, traffic would be a bitch the day before when everyone traveled to visit their families, and a bitch the day after when everyone drove back home—with hangovers. But it wouldn’t take much for anyone to figure that this was some lame excuse, some kind of ulterior motive because really, why the hell would I leave friends and family on an iconic American holiday?

While driving through the deserts of Central Valley, I glanced into my rearview mirror every now and then to soak up the last few moments of the sun as it set over the horizon behind me. I mused about the symbolism of my situation: I was driving farther and farther away from the light as I headed down an endless shadowy road. The dark sky through my front window stood in stark contrast to the image in my mirrors.

I tried to keep myself somewhat active by sipping on two pearl milk tea drinks, one of which was Trung’s. Just before I left, Trung and I got drinks from Tapioca Express. We actually did this the day before, too, and in fact, I had originally planned on leaving the day before, July 3rd. We went to Tapioca Express, and as we wandered around the plaza with our drinks, Trung urged me to stay an extra night and hang out with Peter and black John. I was supposed to hang out with them on Friday for an early July 4th barbeque, but after I got home from Breakthrough, I passed out on my bed for five hours. Trung convinced me, so the two of us chilled at Peter’s house with him and John. We played Super Smash Bros Brawl and I learned how to play beer pong, but knowing how destructive a single beer was to me, we used water so that I wouldn’t wake up the next day feeling too shitty for my solo drive back down to Irvine.

10 PM. The sun had been long gone now. Black skies through my front window, black skies in my mirrors, black skies everywhere. Trying to hold onto any glimmer of light, I found myself staring into a circuit of city lights far away in the east. Maybe it was Fresno, or Visalia. I doubled back between watching the road and watching the cities, but eventually, something completely stole my attention: a burst of red, white, and blue sparkles over the island of yellow lights. I had an entire firework show in the left corner of my eye.

I turned to the passenger seat with my mouth already halfway open and words ready to come out, foolishly thinking that for a second, I had someone to tell, “Oh my god, did you see that?” But no, there was no one, no one but my stuff animal whale, Op, and his mate, Mop. So, I resolved to enjoying the fireworks with only these two and the quiet company that they kept.

The fireworks, they made me think about a lot of things. Like the time my family and I took a vacation to Hawaii and watched fireworks from the shores of Honolulu, and my old brother and I skipped rocks over the warm ocean water—that was 1998. I thought about the time my high school friends and I watched fireworks from the hillside of a rich country club neighborhood, and I tried to flirt with a friend’s friend from her taekwondo class—that was nearly ten years later, in 2007. And the following year, Doug, a fellow Breakthrough teacher, Trung, and I drove around Cupertino tracking down a decent place to park and watch fireworks. We gave up and tried to catch glimpses of fireworks from a school parking lot, but we could only see so much shrouded by the dark silhouettes of redwood trees. We had better luck in 2009, fortunately. Doug directed us atop a mountain in a small town where street lights were a scarce luxury. We stood in the outskirts of the entire Silicon Valley where we spectated the firework shows of several cities across the south bay. I held Trung close in my arms, and occasionally we both reached and grasped the air, pretending to catch the fireworks in our hands as if they were confetti strewn about the night sky.

After seeing a third city’s firework show, I realized the reason I left on July 4th: I didn’t have anyone to enjoy it with. I stopped talking to almost all of my high school friends right after graduation, I broke up with Trung, I broke up with Ranier, I didn’t come back to Breakthrough, I left my family for college three hundred miles away from home, and I just sorta popped back into Peter and Black John’s lives after inexcusably missing out on scheduled hangouts over the last ten months.

But maybe there was more to my reason; the more I reflected on the people I abandoned, the more I realized that maybe I left because, well, I didn’t think that I deserved to enjoy it with anyone. This lonely six-hour trip on the night of July 4th was my punishment.

I got my last firework show around 11 PM, and, trying to keep the last images of light ingrained in my brain, I drove my trip’s last two hours in darkness back to Irvine.