Driving Automatic

It’s just that I really feel broken.
And the clanging of the engine, the gales of smoke behind, they all scream with me.

I don’t even know where I’m going, but the hands on the wheel lock into place and drive. Surely they go somewhere. This can’t be rocketing into endless nothingness, but I’m not the one with the directions.

I watch the gas gauge drop like a seesaw of the sun. Light is barely peeking over the edges now, illuminating vast space as stale as the breath in the car. Whose car is this? Is it mine? Why haven’t we been speaking?

It feels like a treadmill of desert. The endless paint stripes wearing thinner and sadder under our tires, surely that will give it away. The world stopped around us, it must have, we’re on a loop again. Someone skipped the record player. Just the same patch of asphalt shooting back as fast as we drive ahead. Keeping us there until something else catches up. Until the car stops and the iron fingers release their grip on the steering wheel and maybe we start walking, if I know how to anymore, if I can move my legs or think further than a few seconds of foresight.

Because the memory banks are running dry with what exactly it is we’re escaping from.

I feel cold and hollow, I’m insulating my structure from the ripening air beyond the windows. The steel grew in slow, I felt the aches in the night.
She said it was nothing.

I wanted to show her but my arms stopped doing what I wanted them to, and it was over so soon. She didn’t have the metal growing inside. I was thorough.

Whether deliverance approaches from behind or ahead, I still do not know. Passing cars all look the same. Decoration. Plastic bits and dials to convince me that we’re going somewhere after all.

Now I’m a metal nest and it’s driving me elsewhere. To a scrapyard at the edge of the world, or where the world might have been if I bothered to map it. I never knew there was an edge until the machine drove directly there. It wasn’t worth storing before. The data is being overwritten. The memories of how she felt when she cried on my shoulder, and the muscles involved in how to smile, erasing and formatted into something so different.
Watching the fuel gauge, waiting for it to move.
Counting the stripes in the road. If there was a number I didn’t know it yet. But there is time. So I start the count again. It’s only one. A single worm weaving and guiding the way. Away.

The horizon isn’t changing, the pedal is all the way down, and the stripes pass by so fast it’s like we’re not moving at all. I smell the exhaust. It’s burnt.

Wherever away is, we’ll find it.
Well, something will.

They’re knocking at the window but they must be running so fast. Who can make pace with us now? The pedal is digging into the floor and I hear the car crying out. We’re screaming ahead with such speed, nothing can see us.
Then why is there someone
Tapping at the window
And asking for me by name.
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An example soliloquy for my creative writing show, Wordplay. You can find tons of episodes at http://ThisIsWordplay.com!

Inspired by the topics of “insurmountable anticipation,” “trapped in yourself,” “roadtrip to a desolate place” and “the day the robot stole my car.”