What A Truck Driver Leaves Behind Them as They Depart and Fade into Distant Horizon Away from… | by Steven Braden | Nov, 2020 | Medium
How Time Can Find Its Way to Remind You of Its Very Existence
"I sit in the darkness of my own thoughts of the life as one would remember but fade in the distance as the haunting of time moves with every mile.”
Have you ever thought about driving a truck across the United States or even into Mexico or Canada? Some of you might have even just laughed aloud because you're the one awake at 6am. in the morning trying to stay awake to make it to work that’s just on the other side of town.
These are the top two out of three responses that most would easy admit to when asked, but the third answer is the one that with or without a doubt could be the very reason that it became nothing more than a vague response.
The first few weeks was spent out on the road riding with a trainer, which was its own unique adventure, I jumped into my first truck. The excitement I had was wrapped in glee on the outside that was left for time itself to unraveled. Along the way, it was as if time, along with its many mysteries began to tick along with the humming of open roads that soon became somewhat of a familiar voice that stayed consistent with every changing mile.
With each passing trip I took, it seemed to take me somewhere new of which would come and go each with its own flavors of views, culture, and history that would often find its way to somewhat illuminate life, even though it was for only a brief moment with no time to spare because continued to tick. As the journey continued, so did that clock that would turn days into weeks, it was finally time for the request made weeks before, to go home and take a break for a few days. I was rewarded one day home for each week out on the road. Weeks later, as time started to feel as if it was catching me, is when then the reality of trucking unraveled and revealed itself to me as something of a sweet but bitter taste of what was rotten down to the very core.
As the time continued to pace itself and dance around me as it started to spin faster and faster. The hands soon began to spiral and twist until only the numbers were left as if to remind me that time for me was no longer a meaning of importance anymore as the tick of the clock became nothing more than a spoken word of my next load.
I soon began to question the voices of the tick that seemed to grow more into a sound of warning bells. I was told and reminded of the job title, just a driver, that echoed as so did the thought of being replaced like that of their ticking watch. I felt helpless as the time as of time itself that was testing of what I had to endure next.
There was no other support or anyone to reason with as the importance and the shear reality of what time not only took, but what it is continuing to put beyond my grasp as just to taunt at the very essence of each choice and mistake I made. I could hear the tone of it as if it were taken for granted by none other than my own misguided misfortune.
I soon learned that time itself had its own way of catching up with you after when you misuse or disregard it. This was reminded to me along with the very echo of a faded sound that once use to move so slowly as I watched without patience or respect of what it, the clock, the values of time that I lost.
This became so clear to me the morning of which time not only remind me but stood quiet and still as I to was frozen with it. My hands gripped around the wooden rails and a couple of voices all blended behind me as I stood locked into place to see the reminder that time can’t be replaced, tricked, or bartered with. I realized that day that time will come for you when you least expect it, this I learned as time released me and the hands started to grab me as I was pulled from my son’s crib, unable to help or hold him one last time after being frozen there for what felt like hours just to be pulled off and told that it was too late.
