Done Adulting Vol. 1 Ch. 5 (Patreon)

Five more weeks passed, Eric’s choice to linger a bit longer in his world.

Eric had put in his notice and finished the last of his business. Each case file he handed off hurt, but not as much as Eric expected. Not that it was easy, either. Each file was a person, and each person had stories, and he wanted to know how they ended. He knew what the latest chapter said: one more person walked away.

To keep his mind off things, when he wasn’t with Cheryl, Eric drove a lot, something he knew he wouldn’t do again for a very long time, if ever. Eric was never a car person, but now it felt fun again, like when he’d first started driving. The speed, the way he could make his car hug the line around a curve. Mostly he liked driving out of the city and past the suburbs, early in the morning when the sky turned pink and the mist along the rivers hung in the trees until the sun burned it all away; in the evenings, when that same sun sunk low until every cloud in the sky was on fire. He’d take his sunglasses off when the sun finally dipped below the western horizon and feel the coolness of the dusk on his face.

Sometimes after dark he pulled off the highway onto a road going nowhere in particular, past farms long shuttered and small homes with just a light or two in the window shining out on small lawns and gravel driveways. He’d roll the windows down and turn his lights off and pull onto the shoulder, listening to the forest and its cicadas singing in perfect unison and wondering how something so perfect came to be while the breeze brushed softly past him carrying the smell of earth and the fading day-warmth and the dampness of the moss on the trees.

He’d turn around to head for his own bed and stop every time his light illuminated the perfectly round eyes of deer hidden behind the brush, watching him back until they decided he was harmless or else grew impatient and continued on their way across the road or down the road or back into the woods. He’d count the pairs of glowing yellow circles, some standing higher than others and all moving slowly and not afraid for he meant them no harm and they knew it.

Once he drove all night down the highway, stopping once to fill his tank under the harsh florescent lights that lit up the clouds and could be seen miles distant as he sped toward them, and once there felt the stretch in his legs as he stepped out of the car and the cool of the night summer air, the real night air he always slept through, and sat against his hood with the heat near-burning the backs of his bare legs and watched the nocturnal parade of patrons and wondered what they were doing out here and at that hour. He felt the too-cold blast of conditioned air when he stepped into the store and greeted the night clerk with a nod who only half looked up from their magazine and he wondered what life was like for a person who spent their waking hours out here with these other strangers who came and went through those harsh lights and faded back into the distance as two anonymous red circles speeding away. He joined those lights and fled west down smooth tarmac with the truckers and the travelers until that pink glow illuminated the haze in his rearview and he coasted up the ramp and turned left on the bridge and paused halfway and looked east into the morning and west into the night and he was halfway between and he turned around into the west and dared the sun to catch him this time and laughed when he lost a half hour and forty miles later in a town he had never heard of in a state he had never visited but he knew, just as he knew the sun would win, he could walk into any diner on the nearest main street or highway exit and be another soul welcome at the table of travelers among strangers who’d be something almost like friends by the time he’d swept the last of the yolk from his plate with the last of his daily bread.

And he spent other days at parks and malls and swimming pools and museums and watched kids on their summer vacations and wondered what it was like, would he cherish it this time or slowly forget that great gift of youth until he was like they were and like he once had been, oblivious to its limitless value and knowing only faintly that it would end, never being quite able to imagine it. And would that be so bad a thing to forget?