The driving rain is cold and washes through my thin coat in the darkness of the highway shoulder. I trudge onwards, trying to keep my leaden feet far enough from the highway to be safe, as if safety is something I can ever desire. There is a ritual to putting your thumb out when you hear the hiss of the oncoming car, but staying back far enough to be safe. In the last few years, I’ve never been hit, but in this darkness and rain, there is always the chance. All it would take is somebody who had been drinking, a moment of inattention, the screech of tires on pavement, and—

The bright red lights of brakes glitter through the darkness as a van splashes past me, slowing to a halt. Despite the weight of water soaked into my clothes, I pick up my speed to a lumbering run and slide into the offered passenger seat with my backpack between my legs.

There is a ritual to this too, where I express my gratitude to the driver in a quiet fashion while he or she attempts to merge back into traffic without killing us all. Then of course comes the question:

So, where’ya headed?
 
There is no simple way to admit it, so I lie like always. How do you tell someone you are not going [i]to[/i] anywhere, but away from everything? I have been going to so many places so many times, always far away from where I am now. As the conversation moves on, the weather is an easy topic, as the time spent under the freezing rain has given me so many creative words for ‘wet’ that I actually relax, looking into the headlight-lit night through the kaleidoscopic distortion of the rain with only a few unwelcome ghosts troubling my thoughts. Still, I shiver, and the driver helpfully turns up the heat in my direction, regardless of the vaguely dog-like scent I emit while drying.

Then comes the second inevitable question:

So, where are you from?

I paint the picture of my past with a faint brush, faded with intentional effort. I leave out the children, the wife, the house and dog, all things I have left behind to another person who stepped into my shoes without even waiting for them to cool. Sometimes on rare occasions the driver will offer a job, or perhaps a place to stay for a few days, but mostly they will use my words to talk about their own life, as this driver does. His turnoff is coming up, and his words blur together. Proud words about his own family and their recent brush with a drunken driver who ran a stop sign and totalled their car. By a stroke of good fortune, they were uninjured, and as he praises a cold and unfeeling God about his luck, I remain silent to him, keeping my face stoic and my breathing regular. He offers to drive me to the next highway turnoff, but I decline in as few words as I can, stumbling out of his van and mindlessly taking the money he presses into my hand as the rain once again begins to soak my coat. It is as much as I am able to thank him despite the bitter taste of ashes in my mouth, and to put on at least an attempt at a smile as we exchange waves.

Then he is gone, and I am once again alone on the side of the highway. The rain pours down just as hard as before, forming little rivers under my bag as I rest my weary body by the side of the road and let the tears flow. I can still see the mangled car, taste the dust of the airbag on my lips, feel the rain from that horrid night soaking into my suit, hear the anguished wail of the child in the back seat of the twisted wreckage as I threw up into the ditch. 

No matter how far I travel, the memories follow. Twelve men and women denied my fault and set me free, but I carry the prison I have constructed with me, like some tortoise by the road who can never set himself free of his own shell.

Then another vehicle brakes in the rain, a truck this time, and I hustle to it. Maybe this time I can be carried away from my past.

Maybe I can live again.

Maybe…