Ghost Road and Metaphors: How a Recent High School Graduate Realized that "Big Moments" are Kind of Bullshit
In my last few weeks of high school I found myself hitting, quite literally, a roadblock. If you’ve ever been masochistic enough to listen to any two-cent, radio-regurgitated country song, you’ll know that country folk love their back roads. I, Podunk gal that I am, am no exception. It was always nice to know that in the bleary-eyed scramble that was getting ready for school every godforsaken morning I had the cushion to run a couple minutes late. This cushion came in the form of Mohawk Road, a conspicuously cop-free back road that I often raced down in my pursuit of an education. Mohawk Road is a short stretch of unregulated pavement that my little brother has always referred to as the “Ghost Road.” It is lined on both sides with uncomfortably tall grass and eerie, dilapidated farmhouses. Despite its foreboding appearance, I’ve always tried to explain to my brother that the only ghosts that may be haunting “Ghost Road” are those of the squirrels (and possibly a bunny, I’m not one hundred percent sure) that I’ve maimed in my sad attempts to drive like a human being with some semblance of vehicular knowledge. Perhaps this is the reason I was punished in those last few weeks – squirrels are way more vengeful in the afterlife than I thought.
This punishment came in the form of an annoyingly blue car and a girl with a nail-meets-chalkboard voice and a mane that is the hair equivalent of a seven-layer dip. Before the great Cargate incident of 2014, I’d always regarded this girl – let’s call her Lea – with nothing more than mild annoyance. She was a year younger than me and we’d long been in the same abysmal volleyball program at our school. Appallingly uncoordinated, Lea was always more interested in gossiping and trying to rock the spandex for whichever unattractive boys were polluting the bleachers on any given night than actually attempting to improve at the sport. Despite all this, I rarely gave her a second thought.
That is, until the morning when everything came to a halt. Literally. I was cruising to school in my cheap old car (affectionately known as Black Thunder,) when I came across Lea’s ridiculous blueberry of a vehicle stopped on the right side of the road. Parked on the left was the obnoxious truck of certified country boy Archer Kelly, a spectacled asshat who apparently wanted to sink his chips into Lea’s seven-layer dip.
I fumed in Black Thunder as I waited for Lea and Archer to stop talking and get their respective cars down the road, and I spent the rest of the day exploiting the hell out of my residual indignation. “Who the hell do they think they are?” I ranted to my very bored friends, “They don’t own the goddamn road. It’s, like, illegal to just stop! If they want to get it in, they need to do it somewhere that’s not the middle of a fucking road! You know?!” They didn’t know.
This pattern continued over the course of the next few weeks. I would race down the road in Black Thunder, sweating through my t-shirts at the thought of being tardy, only to be halted by Truck Boy and Hair McGee. My frustration mounted. One morning I did my best ‘frustrated mom in a mall parking lot’ impression and just completely laid on my weak horn, only to have Archer honk back at me as if I was the one breaking the law. I told myself every morning that I would confront Lea after school (in a hilarious twist of fate, her parking spot was right next to mine.) However, by the end of the day I was always so thoroughly soaked in teenaged ennui that I never had the energy to bitch her out.
It was only after I graduated that I started to wonder why this whole affair had been such a big deal to me. Sure, it’s rude as hell to stop in the middle of the road (and if you’re a person who does that, then you’re the actual worse), but it isn’t the end of the world. In fact, I actually had an alternative way to get to school. It was slower going, yes, but had I woken up and left my house at a reasonable time it would have been fine.
It has taken many a mid-shower think session to reach the conclusion that my angst wasn’t derived from the situation in and of itself. If I were John Green, I would say it actually stemmed from that situation’s metaphorical resonances. I’ve spent at least the last ten years of my life looking forward to graduating high school. Surely, reaching the end of my public schooling experience would culminate in a grand explosion of feeling and dancing and craziness and nostalgia worthy of every wonderfully bad nineties teen movie ever. I waited for this feeling of paramount finality to wrap itself around my chest and jostle me until I, and everything I’d been for the past thirteen years, was nothing more than a delightful, emotionally powerful blur.
But that’s a feeling that I’m still waiting on. Even though my time was coming to an end in those last few weeks, high school carried on as it always had. My brain knew that everything would soon be changing, and that those weeks would be my last chance to see most of the people I’d grown to know and love, but I never felt the frightening immensity of that. I still don’t, honestly, and sometimes I wonder if I will spend the next several years of my life walking around in this deluded haze, believing that change will never happen even as it’s happening.
Lea and her blue car of death made me keenly aware of this lack of emotion, and I hated that awareness. I was supposed to be swept up in this supernova of loss and transition and possibility, and here was her stupid car parked in the middle of all that. It was the physical manifestation of the block within me. A big, blue block.
I still don’t know whether my inability to feel much about graduating high school is due to me being emotionally stunted or because those BIG MOMENTS in life are completely exacerbated and a little overrated. Still, I hope that as I leave Mohawk Road and the rest of my small town for college in August, I will feel a least a little wistfulness. I also hope that one day I will view Lea and Archer’s middle-of-the-road rendezvousing as not an incredibly inconsiderate minor crime, but as a meet-cute worthy of a countrified Mindy Kaling. Most of all, though, I hope that Lea learns to physically get her ass down the road and metaphorically get out of the feelings of vulnerable soon-to-be graduates.
