by Susannah Orwoll, NonFiction Editor
I was afraid of driving if someone saw me do it. When my mother was teaching me to drive, she was probably more scared of it than I was, though that might be hard. One day in particular was spent trying to learn how to go in reverse. I was so used to covering the gas instead of the brake while driving that I mixed them up.
I hit the gas when I intended to stop, and the car lurched. I stopped us in time, but my heart was still thrown into the backseat. My mother and I were both terrified. She asked me what went wrong and I told her. I was shaking. I wanted to get out of the car and let her drive home. I never wanted to touch the steering wheel again. But she wouldn't let me. She said, "We aren't ending today like this." She made me keep driving. I hated her. The last thing I did that day was reverse correctly. I knew I could do it. I didn’t hate her anymore.
I had a summer of Driver's Ed courses, one week in a public-school classroom where the teachers and students competed to see who could be more bored. They only had one radio station, it seemed, and there were twelve songs in total. I feel like I remember more about those songs than I do the instructions. There are only a few things I remember learning from that class. I remember that it rained the day we were supposed to drive the go-kart. I remember looking away during the red asphalt video -- too afraid to be afraid. The most intriguing part was the DUI day, where there were five or six videos from "hip" kids in the eighties talking about how much they didn't want to drink and drive, afraid to drink at all really. They wanted to teach fear. My mother would gasp and grab the door handle if I went too fast or stopped too slow. It scared me. I was afraid to drive with her. The first time I drove without fear of the pedals was the first time I drove myself to work alone.
These days I always drive alone, and there's nothing to say. I do not miss being afraid. But there's privacy in a car with your mother, gossiping about life going 45 miles an hour. I remember one word from the textbook: velocitation. Velocitation is defined as your body adapting when you go to incredible speeds on the highway, so you don’t notice how fast things are going when the limit drops. Sometimes it feels like the most relevant thing I learned.
Susannah Orwoll is a student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor's in English with a focus on Creative Writing, as well as a Minor in Linguistics. She has been writing since her youth and aspires to become a children's science-fiction and fantasy author and has a passion for space history and astronomy. Susannah is set to graduate in the spring of 2022.
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