Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

A few times, I woke up and it was pitch black outside except for the car’s headlights and the falling snow against the window, and when I looked beside me, he, too, resembled a ghost, cast in the dark gray of night, and yet I wasn’t scared, half dreaming, half awake; he was preciously familiar, like a memory come alive, and it felt in that moving car, for those moments, like we were entirely alone on the road and in the world, wherever we were, that there was nothing outside but the dark and the snow, and to simply watch him, driving, rubbing his eyes, yawning, I was calm and inexplicably content; I could see pieces of our lives floating among the snowflakes, melting on the windshield, and for those brief moments I was living with the certainty that I was exactly where I should be, where everything was deeply quiet yet deeply alive. I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand, despite how much I wanted to or tried, how my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past, they were not mine to determine, not mine to map out, no matter how much they shaped what I had become, however much we were connected, I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount, but what was truly

mine was only a little, no, a minuscule speck of it all, and while this was a sort of devastation to me, one I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice, at least, to be on the way, in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I had left to go.