Hitting the Road

It took less time than I had imagined to pack up my car. It was strange, the way I had been waiting for this moment ever since the day I looked out of my bedroom window and realized there was so much more to life than this little Colorado town I called home. However, now that it had come around, it seemed like all I wanted to do, was stay.

I leant against my car and turned around to face the house I had grown up in for all of my eighteen, nearly nineteen, years. It hadn’t changed much on the outside since the day my mom and dad brought me home as a tiny baby from the hospital. There was a picture, somewhere, taken by an uncle. My mom and dad stood beaming on the same front step, by the same little hand-painted bucket which bloomed flowers in the summer and filled with snow in the winter, cradling a tiny little bundle in a pink blanket. Baby Andie. Baby me.

All these years later, here I was, standing next to my car on the same driveway as I had wobbled down on my first bicycle. It was filed with the clutter of everything that I thought I would need, with all my important documents like bank cards and my driver’s permit hidden safely away. I had a bag of clothes, proof of identity, my laptop, books, my sketchpad, pens, pencils, and chalks ... everything I knew I would need to capture the adventure that would finally begin today. It was as exciting as it was terrifying. I mean, I had never been a troublesome child. I had always been quite happy in my safe little suburban life. I had never been full of angst or anger that I had grown up in the same little town for all my years. No, I had always been quite happy to muddle along, get my grades, make my parents proud ... but all my life, something had been missing. There had been a part of me that, every so often, would stir me up. Perhaps it would be in a particularly boring school lesson, when I was gazing out at the distant mountains, or maybe it would be as I listened to the rain hammering on my window as I tried to get to sleep. I would think about the rain hammering down on all the other places in the world, the places I hadn’t seen yet. I would think about all the beautiful mountains there were out there, waiting to be discovered. The ones I could see from my house were gorgeous, but I knew that there was so much more out there. I knew that, one day, I had to make a break for it. I had to throw everything away and go for it. Hit the road and travel and see all the things I wanted to see, and now was a better time than any. I was young enough to be impulsive but old enough to know when to call it quits. The balance was right, and I knew that I wouldn’t regret it. Of course, it wouldn’t be easy, but I had always liked a little bit of a challenge.

"Looks like you’re really off, eh?"

I turned around to see that one of my best friends, Harry, was standing at the end of my drive, watching me with a slight smile on his face. Suddenly I felt a lump in my throat. Harry and I had known one another since we had been toddlers, and I was really going to miss him.

"It’s not too late to come with me, Harry," I told him softly, and he gave a small, slight chuckle.

"You know how my folks feel about me running off to ... how did they put it? Gallivant around the country with you?"

Harry’s voice was light and joking, as it always was, but I could sense a deep sadness in his brown eyes that told me he was jealous of me and well as happy for me. He, like me, was a free spirit, but unfortunately his parents weren’t as supportive as mine. I had been brought up to seize the moment. Harry had been brought up to carefully consider, weigh the pros and cons, and go with the easiest option, no matter what your heart was telling you.

"How often will this chance come around, Harry?" I asked him softly. I suddenly knew, deep down in my heart, that Harry had to come with me. I couldn’t leave him behind, and I couldn’t let him miss this opportunity. He was coming with me today, or I was going to wait for him.

"Once in a lifetime," Harry answered, and his smile finally faltered and vanished. "You’re so lucky, Andie. Promise me that you’re not going to let any opportunity pass you by while you’re out there, right? And you’d better keep in touch, young lady."

"I’m only going to say this once, Harry," I told him softly. "And I really want you to listen to me. Don’t just hear what I’m telling you. Listen to it, yeah? I know that you were brought up so differently to me, but in spirit we’re exactly the same. I’m so excited for this trip, but I’m nervous too. I don’t know how I feel about going for it all alone. I would absolutely, one hundred per cent love it if you came with me. I’m moving away, Harry, totally away. I’ll always have my roots here, but I know that somewhere on my journey I’m going to find a little place, or perhaps a big city, where I’m going to feel totally at home. I know that you feel the same way too. You can’t sit back and let these things pass you by. You’re an adult now, and if you want to come with me, I would love it. You’re always welcome. You can either say goodbye to me now and go home and have us speak in email for years and years until we finally meet up at some high school reunion or something, or you can take the bull by the horns and do what you always wanted to do. These chances present themselves for an reason, and someone obviously wants you to do it."

There was a long pause as I finished speaking, and I watched as Harry’s eyes travelled around the tidy suburban street we were standing on. There were neat little houses and pristine yards and cute little hedges and white picket fences. There were shiny cars in the driveways, glinting windows, softly singing wind chimes ... and then there was my little battered car with its clutter and me and Harry standing in our scruffy clothes and battered Converse shoes, unnatural colours streaked through our hair and a sense of unrest deep within us. Finally, his smile came back.

"We don’t belong here, do we?" he asked.

"We belong with our families," I said quietly. "But we can come back to our families anywhere we go. I think we should stop talking about this and do it. You remember in elementary school, where we would laugh and talk about running off one day and seeing the world? This is what we can do now. We can leave; we can move away, we can start something brilliant. All we have to do is go for it today."

Both of us knew that once we left, we wouldn’t be living here again. We both knew that we would move one day, but we always thought that it would involve removal trucks and tearful goodbyes. Not a battered little red car and a sense of excitement unlike anything we’d ever felt before.

Harry suddenly grinned.

"Well, then," he smiled. "What say we go for it?"

I beamed, and suddenly I ran at him and hugged him. He chuckled and hugged me back.

"All our lives I’ve been waiting for you to say something impulsive," I laughed.

"You speak sense sometimes, Andie," Harry replied. "Now, how about we go to my place and inform my parents that I’m off to do a bit of gallivanting?"

"It’s about time," I grinned. "You’ve got to promise me one thing, though."

"And what’s that?"

"After this, you’re never going to sit on the sidelines and let any more opportunities pass you by."

"We’ll see if this is a horror story first," Harry laughed.

"Harry!"

"All right, all right, it’s a promise," he grinned, that mischief back in his features again. "Now, let’s get thousands of miles of your driving out of the way."

"Cheek," I huffed, playfully shoving him, and as we got into the car, I couldn’t help but remember all the times we’d had on this driveway, messing around with water fights in the summer and snowball fights in the winter, chalking pictures onto the sidewalk and making huge piles of leaves in the fall.

It was a bittersweet moment to pull away out of that drive, but I didn’t really see the point in dwelling on memories that couldn’t be brought back, when we could be going out to make plenty of new ones.