A Trip’s End

The sun has set on my road trip. It was a fantastic 17 day journey and a type of trip I have missed dearly.  

As a child, I’d wonder with awe about the open road. One of my favorite things to do was to scour the road atlas and imagining what the places in the various states were like. I usually laugh when I hear “people on the spectrum lack imagination.” I may have lacked imaginative play, but there was no shortage of imagining what driving across the Great Plains would be like. 

Of course, this trip wasn’t just a trip for the sake of a trip; I did have the kart race in Fontana and a vacation with my girlfriend in Rapid City. I also saw my mom in Nebraska. It’s odd; I hadn’t been down some of these roads in 11 years and yet, until I went back down them, they felt as if they were in the present until I saw them once more. 

It’s difficult to know of things changing. I do what I can to try and not be aware of change. Change is bad and so long as a certain gas station on the side of the road I liked isn’t known to be closed, it’ll always exist in my memories. Once I’m aware though, it’s very much like it never existed at all.

This trip is over and all the places I stopped at will be etched in my memory  maybe in a decade I’ll have a similar route and if I see change, it’ll make the memories of this trip like they didn’t happen at those places, but for now I can smile knowing that everything is still there. There is no change, and things are the way they’re supposed to be.