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NIGHT DRIVES

BY STEFAN SPECIAN

When it gets late and I'm bored, or too stuck in my own head for my own
comfort, my general tendency is to hop in my car and drive. There's no set desti-
nation in mind, and very little purpose besides the sheer act of doing it, aside from
perhaps clearing my head. Maybe I come up with a mopey story to spill onto a page
when I get back, or a poem. If so, that's great. If not, well they can't all be winners.

It's a habit I developed the summer between my freshman and sophomore year
of college, a summer when I was stuck on campus for two weeks, mostly by my-
self. I was running a writing program I'd won a grant for down at the Boys and Girls
Club. The program itself was undeniably enjoyable, but only lasted for the morning,
and left me with an entire afternoon alone in rural Maryland to do basically nothing.
The afternoons I could manage though; I could drive into Baltimore, go crash at a
coffee shop, or go hide in the virtually empty library, feeling like a trespasser and
a squatter as I read the newspaper and drank a cup of coffee. But the nights, they
were brutal.

To give the story context, it should be noted that the previous year my stron-
gest familial tie in the area was my grandmother, who lived in Overlea in a duplex,
the same one she'd resided in for over fifty years. Every weekend I could I would
visit, and take her to lunch or brunch at Belvedere Market, whichever was more
applicable, then relaxed at her house while I did my laundry. However, around the
time I was down for the summer, she was hospitalized, due to the rapid spread of
cancer through her body, or, as my then boss and good friend Scott Johnson once
put it, "the stuff nature throws at you when it knows it's your time but can't find a
way to send you off." In short, she was on her last legs, and the reality of this was
weighing heavily on me.

My grandmother was the stubborn sort, chiseled from mid 1900s ideals of
cleanliness and properness and an unending desire to never be a burden or pain to
anyone, especially family. When I had chosen to go down to college in the area, the
unsaid agreement between my parents and I was that one of my new roles would
be checking in on her as often as possible, for her sake and, secondarily, to help
preserve my sanity. Even I was not aware of the cancer; I knew she'd seemed to be
getting frail, but that I chalked up to old age, along with her simply being a small,
thinly built woman (I was taller than her by age twelve). She'd hidden it for some
time, a testament to her stubbornness.

And so as the nights rolled in, and I sat in the dorm common room of the suite
I was housing in, not even the emotional analgesic of Netflix could calm my mind.
My roommate for those two weeks, who I won't name given I have seen him on
campus since returning, was the strange sort, someone who I had very rarely seen
leave the room and stared at me whenever I was in it; hence, I only went in to
shower, grab things, and sleep, preferring to spend whatever time I had in the suite
in the common room. But as the clock went towards midnight, and sleep felt far
away, I would grab my keys, my wallet, and my phone and walk out to my car.

The key in the ignition. The engine purring and the low squeal as I backed out
of my parking spot and drove towards Main Street, and then turned onto Route 27,
taking it South towards Mount Airy. Once I got beyond city limits and saw the emp-
ty road before me, I'd rev the engine, slowly accelerating, sometimes twenty miles