Thursday, November 14, 2013

Lancaster Highway, by all rights, should be just another one-lane backroad in south Charlotte. It’s lined with neighborhoods until it’s not–to the tune of a dive bar, a gas station, a mulch farm, and a full-fledged waste treatment plant that occasionally blankets the aforementioned neighborhoods in a rank shitcloud. Traffic is especially terrible during rush hour, a phenomenon only magnified by its limited throughput. It’s a road even die-hard bikers avoid.

But the thoroughfare is special to me because I seem to find myself on it during key junctures throughout my tenure in Charlotte. I remember tearing down it during an interview trip, gas tank near empty, and then pulling into the Shell with a sigh of relief. I remember tearing down it in a frenzied rush to the mall parking lot, early one evening, in search of a VPN key fob from the job made possible by that same interview. More recently, I remember dropping off a U-Haul truck one foggy morning. And tonight, after shipping eight huge boxes of DVDs and dropping my dining set off at Cheshire’s, I drove down it feeling just a little bit freer.

For a moment, I caught a glimpse of the faraway shore I’m trying to reach. There’s still so much to do, but all of it must be done. I don’t know why this was heartening, too, but I realized I had brought this series of events upon myself. There was a clear fork in the road, and I chose a path. The road not taken never completely left the picture, though, and I’ve been seeing a lot of old friends lately. On one hand it’s nice, but also strangely stressful because you feel like two different people. I’ve got to reach that shore–become that new person, whole, lighter than air.