Solitude is a long stretch of blacktop plotting my next move before I even know to make it—grazing the borders of legality, unbound yet trapped by my own hands upon the wheel.

Solitude is a gentle swerve into the turn—a coast to the outcropping before allowing the wheel to straighten on its own. It’s a push and pull, waxing and waning as if to color within the taunting white lines.

It’s adrenaline pumping as I coax the driver of an Audi into a brief tango from one light to the next, scanning the horizon in preparation for whatever else might happen, reading my opponent’s every move before they make it. Other drivers can be so predictable sometimes…

The engine shudders against the soul of my right foot as I well up from within, wild and free….and thankfully alone. That hooded rumble rarely sees the light of day, yet brightens my nights—offering an escape from the mundane….a shot at youth revisited, flashing back to when it all began…

I was 11 the first time my dad took me out racing in his pearl green, ’94, Z28 Camaro. My kid brother, too. He was only 9. Dad would take us to McDonald’s for swirl cones and off we’d go—out onto 2222, the swerviest of roads cut through crumbling walls of limestone.

At stop lights he’d rev his engine next to other sports cars, insisting neither of us look at the other driver. He took racing quite seriously, and his was a beast of a vehicle…

Thundering through those winding roads, one night a week—a mid-life crisis on wheels, we found ourselves enjoying every second of it. After all, we had some pretty fresh wounds back then—and those nights were like therapy for me. Though, some might argue they were more like reckless endangerment…

Even today, I credit my dad for my driving and observation skills. And I still get behind the wheel for therapy, as well as the rush….the power…the solitude.

It never goes away…that hunger for speed, for that roaring silence, for simultaneous release and control of my darkness within the faux safety of a fiberglass shell. When I need to be alone, I hop in my car and drive. There’s something about having the ability to put myself somewhere else—even if I have nowhere to go.

Sometimes that’s all I need, though. Just to remind myself that I can move. That I can stretch my legs across my Mazda’s floorboard, feel the gentle graze of the wheel turning on its own against my left palm, that I can choose to drift in silence with only the wind in my ears, or blast my music while I scream out my demons. That I can rise up from inside myself with only a minimal amount of mischief—and cry intensely if I fucking feel like it…with no one talking at me for a change. It’s truly liberating.

My car offers me solitude, from a world I’ve always struggled to face without it. It allows me to escape and process, to remind myself I still have power within me—even when life’s highway gets too swervy and the walls are crumbling down. I know if I just follow the road, eventually, I’ll get there. Wherever “there” is…

But for now, the solitude will have to do…