14 June 2012
If you stare long enough at the lights they get that great photographic blur, bokeh, which always makes the scene look deeper and far more interesting than it actually is. The soft green console lighting inside the car contrasts nicely with the red tail lights and white oncoming headlights. The dusk has come and now ebbs away into the night.
We will journey until early morning to return to reality. The journey is long enough to remember our vacation, play it through; either backwards or forwards, doesn’t matter because vacations are always bookended by reality.
We sit in near silence as the radio hums with mellow music. No one speaks, each is beginning a gentle reboot of their brains. Tasks, responsibilities, lists, phone calls, appointments are slowly returning from the closet we shoved them into only a week ago. They step out blearily in to the cognitive light, walking unevenly to the front of our brains to resume their rightful places.
We pass under bridges, signs and between beams of orange lights, passively returning to our lives. Even though we are well rested we feel at our lowest and sleepiest right now.
The miles roll on, drawing us closer to the place called ‘home’, somewhere we’d never choose to take a vacation. Returning to jobs and people who we spent hours last week escaping at the quickest speeds legal. We long for vacation which calls in a louder voice than home ever does. So why do we insist on living a life somewhere we always desire to leave? Because place, people, job, home we crave to leave but rather normality.
Normality is the Reality we flee from.
Homeward Bound • Opuss № I