Road Trip

written by: SAH

Kyle starred into the rearview mirror at his children. His daughter stared straight ahead, her eyes fixed on her mother's headrest. Every once in a while she cracked a little broken smile. If Kyle didn't know about SpongeBob, he'd think his daughter was insane. His son, equally oblivious, stared into his lap, where a miniature video game machine, clearly design for tiny fingers, held his attention in a vice.

Kyle sighed and turned to his wife, intent on sharing his mixed feelings about the silence in the back seat, but she too was engaged, fingers tapping furiously away on her laptop — plugged into the dash where, in his father’s car, the cigarette lighter would have been. She, like her children, was wearing headphones, each in an effort not to disturb the others in the vehicle.

They were all moving over the face of the earth together, but Kyle was traveling alone.

He returned his focus to the road where a truck had appeared without him noticing. He tapped the break, releasing cruise control and changed lanes. He started aloud, “Honey, have you ever been going along and realized you don’t know how you got where you are?”

She hadn’t heard him. He knew she hadn’t heard him. None of his passengers even noticed the change in speed.

“This isn’t quite what I had in mind,” he said to no one. “I was hoping things would be more like when I was a kid. We could share stories or play games. My father used to fill our heads with trivia about the things we passed by. I remember looking out the window for hours at the passing landscape and dreaming about what was happening on the horizon. I remember the travel itself, not just the destinations. Sometimes not the destinations at all.”

They passed another sign for a unique roadside attraction ahead. He smiled to himself as he made plans to stop. “Did I ever tell you about the time we....”

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