I've been driving since I was 18. I always felt "free" when I drove. There was a period of three years when I had no access to a car and I was in another country and, hence, I couldn't drive. It was unbearable. I felt caged in, trapped.
My car has always been my ticket to freedom. As long as I had my car, I was free to be me and to be anywhere I wanted to be. Sounds like a country song, right?
When I initially realized I was going to end up in Fresno, I knew I was going to drive there. I was going to drive my little green Toyota from Houston to Fresno with a U-Hual trailer hitched up to the back. It sounded plausible at the time. It sounded like a good idea. I could do it. As long as I had my car, I could do anything. Of course, my parental units had a fit.
My parents didn't like the idea of me, their only daughter, driving halfway across the US by herself. I guess I could understand that. But I wanted to drive. It was the essence of "coming of age": leaving home, making that long trek with whatever you could pack in the trunk, and starting over again on your own. I would have so downloaded and played the theme song to the Mary Tyler Moore show because it would have been so apt, so romantic, so how-I-pictured-it-would-be.
Two days of emotion-filled arguments that ended with me slamming the phone down and angrily shouting "I can't talk to you right now!" I had had enough but I was too stressed to continue fighting. I got my stubborn streak from my Dad and he wasn't going to budge. Time was quickly approaching. The moment I decided to give into mom and dad's advice, I felt like I had lost. I know they meant the best for me but in my rage I felt like the powerless 13-year-old all over again. Gawd, they drove me crazy! What pissed me off even more was that my brother seemed to be in cahoots with them. Looking back at it, I see how emotion really does make you irrational. At the time I really did feel like they were trying to control me when in actuality they were just scared. I think my brother summed it up best when he said, "Yea, I know you can do it but just humor them, ok? If you travel like that, that's like 3 days of worry. If by plane, it's like a couple of hours." He made sense and so I finally listened.
So, in the end, I paid some carrier to ground transport my car and I flew. My mom actually came with me with the notion of "Well, if I come, that's more luggage we can bring" but I knew it was really "I want to make sure you'll be okay in that place-we-have-no-relatives." After arriving in Fresno, I was actually glad mom was there. The first week is the loneliest time in a new place. You don't know where anything is. There's too much stuff to establish or switch over. And, you don't have anyone to help you through all that. It wasn't a new concept for me because of my whole India thing but, unlike in Fresno, I was in a dorm there with a hundred other girls in the same boat. Here, I was the only one. I'm not going to lie: it was kind of scary. Mom being there did help.
A couple of days after I moved into the apartment, the carrier called to let me know that my car was now in California. I was happy. Mom and I walked about a block away to meet the truckdriver. He handed me the keys. We got into the car and drove back to the apartment. I was reunited with my little green Toyota and I felt whole and free again. It gave me hope that I had left the craziness behind.
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