I had this thought: driving either up or down the 405 feels like a goodbye. My last week in LA was steeped in sleep deprivation and a constant caffeinated buzz, which somehow made the driving mindscape more active. The way up to Santa Monica I knew by heart, having driven it so many Friday nights in the spring it felt like a routine. A slightly out of practice one, at this point. The way down to San Diego, a fairly new and less constant routine. Either would rust soon, though.
I told everyone I hated driving. Could never get used to it. That I looked forward to the train commutes that would soon become part of my new routine. But if I’m really honest with myself, those drives were the closest I could get to the long walks to and from the subway stations back in my teenage days: where the crowd just melted into an insignificant hum and my thoughts filled up the space. Where stories took place and fell apart. Where words tangled with each other in the most peculiar ways and I had the space to savor them. Once I got used to driving the way I did for walking, which I must have at some point, that space appeared for me again.
One of the first nights I drove down the 405 from Santa Monica, it started raining. Word fell like rain in my mindscape, too, conglomerating, cascading, colliding into one another. Chiaki Sato and Suki Waterhouse lyrics rolled together, wrapped in melancholy, playing slowly with light and memory. And all of a sudden I was hit by the transience of things, all things that can ever be. I had my hands on the steering wheel but my head was somewhere else, somewhere between dinosaurs and the silent, floating, dying fate of planets in an expanding universe, raindrops falling like flower petals around it. And for the boy I had only started to know at the time, I had the thought that if I were to write him a letter, I would start with “to you, who I will eventually part ways with,” because I was not thinking of parting ways the way people usually part ways—I was thinking of the moment we draw our last breaths and perish, when the signs of existences overlapping vanish like rain down the windshield, or tears in the rain, as someone has said before, regardless of who we are to each other and where we would be at that moment. I ended up never writing him a letter.
But that strong awareness of transience stayed with me for the whole year. Later this year, many times, I found myself yearning for the red leaves in the deep mountains of Japan. How fragile and thin they were in the freezing nights, in a floating world. How they were enshrouded by the words of Yoshida Kenkō or Sei Shōnagon, stretching on, like droplets of eternity. How I wanted no more than to see those droplets of eternity among the red leaves, each moment stretched, a spoonful of death crushed into shallow breathings out of reach. I came back from Japan in early December, after popping a few more droplets of eternity there and wondering how many chances I had left. I never drove up north on the 405 after that, but once down south to San Diego. Unlike the drives north, those drives were much longer and mistier. The mists in San Diego, especially accompanied by sunlight, always felt fuzzy to me, so when driving down I thought about the last day my rabbit spent in Long Beach, before I left for Japan. I had already emptied her room by then, so for most of the time, she would just innocently yet intensely stare at me with nothing else to do. I remember taking a nap that afternoon and waking up to golden streaks of sun leaking from my curtains, feeling a little bit out of my own body. I walked barefoot to the windows and touched the cold glass through the golden streaks, thinking how all the art and music and poetry created in the world felt so distant and absurd in this moment, how the only real thing I knew was the furry nose of the rabbit, destined to perish in less than a decade, between my index and middle fingers. Sunlight and transience filled the room and I thought, staring back at the rabbit: space is just another language we’ve grown to learn.
And maybe mindscapes are, too. Right now they’re in hibernation again, in the absence of long drives and warmer winters. The boy who I did end up writing a letter to recommended me a few Cannons songs earlier in the fall, and I started listening to them pretty constantly. Funnily enough, one of my favorite songs from them was about the 405. I’m going through emotions in motion, they sang, down this road. And I think about all the thoughts I had on the 405, everything in motion: words, memories, seasons. Maybe it’s the graduation effect, but maybe I never truly disliked driving quite that much. A friend told me earlier this year that leaving a place I’ve grown to call home just means I have another place I can call home to return to. So, perhaps, I will reunite with that mindscape again, and with all the seasons on the 405—down this road, soon enough.