The Trip of a Lifetime
May 12 2026
I think of the many people
I might have been.
The forks in the road
I could have taken.
The intersections I sailed through
too keen on making time.
The turns I missed
and the rutted lanes, too tempting to resist
I abandoned soon enough,
reversing in a cloud of dust
with one hand on the wheel.
As if life was a road trip
without good maps
or sense of direction.
Looking back, of course, it would seem to add up;
like connecting random dots
and imagining a picture
even when there’s not.
Because where some see scattered stars
others find constellations
. . . despite celestial navigation
not working that way.
The narratives we construct
to explain ourselves
are like the old paper maps
that fanned out like accordions;
awkward to hold
and blocking the view.
That became crumpled and faded and hard to read,
stained
from gas station coffee
that was always too weak.
That eventually tore along the folds,
becoming almost as delicate
as ancient manuscripts
— handled with kid-gloves
in a dimly lit museum
as a stern minder watched.
That were wadded together
in the glove box
or the pocket behind the seat,
bulging out
like an autobiography
of the trip of a lifetime
and disappointed plans.
That went with the car to the wreckers
and were crushed along with it.
No retracing your steps, or reminiscing;
no filling in
all the places you missed,
or looking back
now wish you did.
A sentence in the 3rd last paragraph of this Atlantic article (link below) caught my eye. So I wrote it out, and just let myself riff. (And if you think there is some more esoteric process to my writing, you’re wrong. Endings are rarely foreseen. The journey takes me, not the other way around.)
“Surrendering to the computer had given him the courage to sample the lives of the many people he might have been.”
I suspect we all think this about the choices we made, or failed to make: not only comparing ourselves retroactively to other possible versions of ourselves, but usually unsparingly to other actual people all the time. The fallacy, of course, is that we tend to idealize these hypothetical selves or unknowable lives (is their marriage really as happy as it looks?) — filling in the blanks with the best case scenario — while we are all too aware of the disappointing details of our own reality.
I did rescue a wad of old paper maps from the seat-back pocket before getting rid of my 20 year old Jeep. (20 years. Yes, I’m both stubborn and frugal. Not to mention find change hard.) Still have them, stuffed into the back of a high shelf in the entranceway closet.
Btw, I could never do what this guy did. Too limited. Too fixed in my ways. Too averse to change.
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