Melanie Hamon
I am an existentialist driver.
It is Sunday morning, and I am driving between one place and another, and I am learning that balancing the steering wheel and my coffee cup between two like-minded hands is not one of my strong suits. As an existentialist driver, I know that life on the highway is absurd, and that my actions within the next two hours determine who I am once I reach home. Today, I have decided to be content and carefree of my mundane worries: my pumpkin spice latte, banger Spotify playlist, and precise location in the middle of nowhere have all made this a feasible possibility for now.
At nine in the morning – the clock on my driver’s console reads 2:58 from the last time the battery died – I feel suspended somewhere between just having started my day and just about to end it. If the day has just started, I can wipe out the morning before I stumbled into my car, when I woke up on the couch of a friend’s house and snuck out the door before 7am without saying goodbye. I tiptoed over the sleeping forms sprawled on the living room floor and wondered if something was intrinsically broken in me for not lying there with them, passed out on the carpet from a night bursting with too much good cheer and horrifically loud music (still banging incessantly against my skull seven hours later). When the sound of retching reached the bathroom doorway, I was busy staring at the dark circles under my eyes, questioning if it had been insensitive to spend the downtime finishing homework on my phone. I stared at the zit on my cheek and the part of my hair, wondering if I’d turned ugly. I stared at my lips, too, replaying the night in my head and trying to catch the moments when I’d spoken too soon or too harsh. If I stared at myself hard enough, perhaps I could find out which part of me had so fundamentally changed that it had left me unable to hold a genuine conversation with my closest friend.
Two years ago, we were always “the bitch” and “the nice one.” This is Mel, she’s my best friend, and she’s a bitch, she would say to newcomers. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her. Now, when she talks to me she’s polite, her smile only half-up and her eyes already wandering. She avoids me during the day only to gently bump into me when there’s a drink in her hand, her slurred “I love you,” barely touching my ear before she moves on to the next person in the room. I move on, too. I’m walking in the lines of those unspoken rules in our friendship: doing my best to appreciate the small moments and fulfilling my promise to always, always keep trying to work it out.
When I looked at my reflection in the morning, the same old face stared back at me. After almost ten years together, only recently had I been unable to laugh at her jokes or unwilling to dance in the kitchen with her to a song I didn’t know – but on the outside, I had never really changed. Before I turned over the engine of my car this morning, I was tangled up in the person I was supposed to be and tripped at every curve by the person I was turning into. I was thinking about how I had failed to be the right one.
I suppose that, on the highway, there is an argument to be made about whether driving embodies contractarianism or existentialism. My understanding of the two stems from a ten-minute video on YouTube, but the ideas follow me onto the highway still. In existentialism, the rules are fake and I define myself. The ideas surrounding existentialism are those of freedom and infinite choice, as opposed to divine manifestation or the limits of others’ rules. In contractarianism, though, the rules are the result of an unspoken, mutually-agreed-upon social contract, and my evolution of “good” or “bad” depends on my adherence to them. The act of driving on the highway is refreshingly simple: everyone with a brain knows that the left lane goes fast and the right lane goes slow. Easy-peasy. So, if everyone on the road agrees to a simple set of rules that govern the morality of those driving, an intensive trip down I-79 makes one a contractarian, right? Unless you count the man who abruptly slows down to 60 mph in the left lane to read his latest text message, or the elderly woman who has been cruising comfortably in the middle of the lane-dividing line for an hour and a half now. Even taking into account any infrequent discrepancies, circumstances like these occur too often to consider the social contract of the road “mutually-agreed-upon.” No, driving on the highway constitutes existentialism, where everyone is out of their minds and the decisions you make only determine how crazy you are in your own eyes. Every man on the highway is out for himself.
When I’m not in the car, I keep a detailed record on whether a person I meet is “good” or “bad.” A “good” person would be one who holds a funeral for lamp-burned cicadas, who nestles against you during a movie without even needing to ask if you’ve been hugged lately, who listens to every opinion and checks their privilege before raising their voice or changing their mind. A “bad” person takes your medicine from the drawer without asking, hides their sedan in a parking spot they know is reserved, and offers you another drink even when you told them you’ve had enough. “Good” people are to be befriended, “bad” people are to be avoided. Which should be simple, but everyone on the ground follows a different set of rules and everyone can agree they aren’t out on their own, which means sometimes good friends make friends with bad people and expect you to tag along anyways. If you want to be “good,” you have to smile at your best friend as she accepts another drink and immediately spits it out on the floor, too drunk already to stop herself and too drunk to keep her mouth closed. You have to mingle with the people who keep handing her the alcohol and smile, and convince yourself not to throw them out, because it’s not your party and you didn’t invite them and you don’t make your own rules. If you want to be “good” in the real world, you have to learn that staying good means being bad.
When I get into the car and turn onto the highway I can accept that nobody is looking out for me and that I am looking out for nobody. Sure, there are rules to follow, but if the person ahead of me loiters around the speed limit and forces me to slow down, I have equal choice to tailgate or complete an unorthodox pass on the right side of the highway (while flipping the bird, of course). Both options are right because both get me to my destination on time, and neither relies on the decisions of another person. The goal is simple, and measurable, and quantifiably attainable.
Yet I know there will come a day when the rules change. Young people will be speeding on the right side of the highway or, more likely, napping while their automated car drives them to their next destination. No cars will tailgate other cars and no cars will even pass one another, because each pre-programmed unit will accelerate exactly to the mileage of the speed limit and then cruise away. Highway theologies will turn into regular roadside daydreams. Eventually, my understanding of the highway will appear to others as rigid, or overly sensitive; it will leave me feeling empty and confused, questioning my driving techniques in the mirror after I park. My now-peaceful life on the road will inevitably change, and I will be expected to grow along with it. Right now, though, my rules make sense, and I know that the only person who really has to answer to them is me.
On the road, I come from nowhere and I go nowhere – I belong to nobody but myself. This world is absurd and nobody knows what they are doing, but for two hours on this drab stretch of concrete, I have the power to be free. I have the power to be completely alone.
If only my existentialist driving beliefs lasted more than these few hours.