Accidentally

For twenty-two years, I have wandered from place to place, never settling down. There was always somewhere else to be, something else to do. The mundane now — school and work, cleaning and cooking — stoked the embers in my heart like an oxygen tank. Greatness awaits you. This conviction was always strongest while driving at night, listening to jazz and classical music on Radio-Canada while obeying the stern orders of the French female voice on Google Maps. One day, this will be part of your origin story. The days before an artist's ascension are themselves encased in glass, examined as part of the oh-so-important backstory of a new champion. Surely, teachers will one day tell their students that I, [NAME REDACTED], turned left on a snowy Thursday in January because of a lifelong yearning toward looking backward toward the past. The children of future generations will listen in awe to adults waxing philosophical about the way I grasped the steering wheel, the tunes I hummed over the saxophone solo saying from my speakers, the erratic braking that earned me honks from everyone around me. All this will become part of a larger narrative, imbued with subtle meaning and idyllic romance.

But for now, it has not been forgotten by the world (and especially not by the author, viewpoint character, and principal actor of my life) that I was just a bad driver belting out melodies over the whirring of my engine which drowned out the sound of the francophone radio channel. I obeyed the female voice coming from my phone because that was my only lifeline and ticket home, as despite having lived in Waterloo my whole life I could still not go on and off the highway without referring to a map. Though, maybe there was also some deep need for me to be led around by an assertive, responsible woman. Whether this was because of some sort of childhood trauma is an issue for Freud's speculation — though, as a captive audience to my own being, I was definitely aware that there was something under the surface that was threatening to overtake my life and lead me down a new, unexplored path.

Since when did I want to become a writer?