The drive up so far was smooth. A few tough patches here and there, but nothing a simple flick of the high beams couldn't fix. But you're quickly approaching the long, straight stretch of the road that is almost always engulfed by a cloud of fog. The darkness is eerie, and strangely (and a little scarily) familiar.
The drive, still, is smooth and clear. It's nighttime now, so definitely a bit harder to see than a few hours ago, but nothing you haven't dealt with before. The night will pass, and then comes another day. But before you even finish that train of thought, you notice that you can't even see 3 feet in front of you. In an instant, the nighttime is swallowed by a choking darkness, so uncomfortably humid that you struggle to breath. Nothing in front, nothing behind. The high beams turn out to be utterly useless, doing nothing but diffusing the light into the darkness, almost making it even more viscous and unmanageable. You flick on the fog lights and see marginally better, the faint outlines of lanes three feet ahead and three feet behind.
The lanes were designed for this very purpose, acting as a clear set of guidelines for drivers to follow, even when it gets impossible to see. But where they lead, you have no clue. The last time you were here, indecisiveness threw you into a last minute swerve off the turnpike and you ended up in New York City. Not the worst place to be, to say the least, but perhaps that's not the destination now. But then again, where do all of the other lanes lead? In the darkness of the thick fog, it's impossible to tell.
In these situations, it's best to slow down and stay course. The lanes will guide you where you need to be. You shift down to fifth, then to fourth. But the change in speed is uncomfortable, almost as if you weren't moving at all. And what if someone comes up behind you in the fog? There goes that. So you shift back up, all the way to sixth. You feel the car piercing through the fog, jerking left and right as you hit patches of inconsistent pressure.
Maybe the lane you're in isn't paved properly? The car shouldn't be rattling so strongly and jerking so sporadically. You figure the left lane might be better, so you nudge the steering wheel in that direction. Big mistake; you're already in the fast lane. You feel the vibrations of the left tires rolling over the bumps in the leftmost lane, indicating the absence of any further space, the feedback magnified 10 fold by the speed at which you're driving. You quickly nudge the wheel back to the right, realigning the car inside the lane, still unable to see any further than 3 feet.
Hopeless and lost, you keep both hands on the steering wheel, you concentrate and focus solely on keeping the car between the lines. With every second that passes, you tell yourself, "DON'T. CROSS. THE. LINES." With any luck, you'll pass through only mildly scathed. With any luck, you won't take any last minute swerves or unnecessary down-shifts. With any luck, you'll exit this glob of darkness and fog, still in control of where you want to go.
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