I realized at thirty-five that I was not the driver,
that something else had been behind the wheel, a quiet survivor
of the personality I thought was making all the calls,
and I was in the backseat watching highway through the walls
of tinted glass that filtered every color slightly wrong.
The passenger has been here since the damage, since the song
that played when everything went sideways, since the brain
decided living at a distance was the antidote for pain.
The passenger rides. The passenger waits.
The passenger watches the highway through the gates
of someone else’s decisions, someone else’s turns,
the passenger sits still while the engine burns.
I tried to grab the wheel once, around the age of forty-two,
I lunged from the backseat into something bright and new
and felt the car swerve hard, the panic in the overcorrection,
the world too close, too fast, too much in every direction.
I crawled back to the backseat and I let the other drive.
The other knows the route. The other keeps the car alive.
The other pays the mortgage, holds the conversations, sleeps
beside my wife, and I watch from the backseat and he keeps
everything on schedule, everything on track,
and I have stopped wondering if I will ever take it back.
The exit signs keep passing and I read them like a list
of lives I could have lived if I had not been the one dismissed
from the driver’s seat before I learned to steer.
The passenger does not complain. The passenger is here.
And here is far enough from the wreck that started it,
far enough from the original hit
that shattered the windshield and put the real one in the back.
The passenger rides. The highway is black.