How Not To Get Lost

I went driving this afternoon with the intention of doing errands, only to realize that I didn't actually have any errands to do. Errands are just an excuse to go driving for me, anyway, so I decided to go without an excuse this time. Although technically I was "at the bank" if you ask my mom.

I decided after a few minutes that I was driving to clear my head and get out of the house after being inside so much in the past few days. That was part of it, but as I kept driving, I realized I was challenging myself to get lost. I went across town to the part I don't drive every day, but was dissapointed in that I kept finding myself in familiar places. I think the longest I lasted was about 2 minutes in an unfamiliar neighborhood before I was back on a main road. I didn't realize how interconnected everything here is, and that after living here for 18 years, I do actually know a lot of it. I was surprised that I couldn't physically get lost here, because I've always thought that there were parts of town I didn't know at all. Well, I was wrong then and all I really discovered was that this town isn't all that big.

I then realized that I knew this all along, and if I really wanted to get lost all I had to do was cross the border into another town. But of course I didn't want to do that. Why was I driving, then, if I only wanted to get lost in familiar places? Maybe I was looking for something new and unfamiliar in a place I know so well. The fun was gone when I did actually cross the border and now had serious potential of getting lost. It was a strange drive, overall, because I didn't even have good music anyway. I went through an old CD from the summer very quickly, one I had made at a very different time, and found that none of the songs were really that good for thinking.

Then I thought maybe I'm driving to be an anonymous part of other people lives, but that's not so easy to do when you're driving a bright orange car. It just doesn't happen - it's like every time I take that car out, someone recognizes it. I had to go back to my first reason - maybe I'm just driving to clear my head. Yet I've spent too much time clearing it out lately, so maybe I was looking for something to distract me from all that frantic mind-cleaning. I don't know what I expected to find - it was just neighborhood after neighborhood, stoplight after stoplight, left after right after left.

But whatever I was doing, it worked - I wound up walking out of Starbucks with my favorite drink in hand to hear a little voice in my head saying, "Time to go home." I came home and now I feel better than I did, even though I'm not sure what I felt before my dissapointing adventure into the vast jungle of my hometown. But I was happy to come up the driveway and see that my mom, brother and sister had gotten home from shopping, so that the house wasn't so quiet anymore. Maybe I'm not that tired of my family - maybe just tired of being in the quiet?