lost
by Jamison O'Sullivan
There’s something in me that needs to get lost.
I’ve never understood the why of it, what triggers the feeling that comes over me sometimes. How sometimes I feel too grounded, like I’m stuck to the floor. How I feel like my entire life is frozen in place, waiting.
When I’m in Connecticut, this is when I grab car keys and drive too fast down Route 202 and take side roads I’ve never been on before, playing music too loud and forcing myself to slow down and take in the view. Sometimes I cry when I get stuck like this; sometimes I don’t break down until I find myself somewhere new. But there is a part of me that is always itching to run away, to find some new place, to figure out the secrets of the world and understand how everything fits together. There is a part of me that longs to find their home, their place in the world, the spot where everything comes together.
What is destiny? What is personal truth? How do we know which are the lines we have to follow, and which are dead ends?
I used to think the city was my truth, with endless streets to lose myself. Cobblestones to trip over in Beacon Hill and one-way signs in Back Bay. Blisters on my heels from shoes too stiff to be walking the length of the city, past brownstones and parks and gleaming high-rises. I explore, waiting to find the place that sings to me.
As time passes, as I find more things, it gets harder for me to lose myself. My brain maps out the places I go, puts little pins on it so I remember where I was when I had my first kiss, or my first race. The route I took when I snuck out for the first time, and the exit numbers on the highway on the way home. Latitude and longitude, mapping out my life, my entire existence, onto a grid. Once I find a place, it is near-impossible to lose it, so I long for something new, an adventure, the unknown. I’ve always been good at directions; sometimes I wonder if I’d still be this restless if I wasn’t.
It’s strange though—for all my talk of losing myself, of finding the new, I never want to do it alone. Sometimes, yes, I find comfort in the solitude that is driving alone at night, when you can play whatever music you’d like, when you can scream or cry or drive so fast the view out the windows blur. But I can be destructive when I’m alone, taking corners too fast with a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, not sure if I’m doing it because I want to feel like a motorsport driver or because I want to know what will happen if I skid off the road. Want to know what would follow.
So sometimes I don’t want to be alone, simply to avoid that feeling of what if I kept going? If something bad happened? If I drove too fast; walked too close to the edge? I don’t want that in my head. Sometimes I want someone in the passenger seat, someone walking beside me.
When we’re both home from school, I text Kaelyn to ask if she wants to go for a drive with me. She lives two houses down the street, so I pick her up in my RAV4 and let her have aux. She blasts COIN and Young the Giant––music that makes you feel like you’re on top of the world––and I let her pick the turns every time we come to an intersection because her sense of direction is as bad as mine is good. Sometimes I want my sisters arguing in the backseat, listening to Alt Nation and figuring out new ways to get from Thomaston to West Hartford, because we’ve been on Route 6 through Bristol so many times that the fun of driving disappears. Sometimes, I’ve learned, the only way to get lost is to put someone else in charge of where you go, even if you’re behind the wheel.
When I’m in Boston, and I can’t drive with Kaelyn to forget everything that makes my head spin, I walk to get lost. And when I’m in Boston, I walk with Gabby. She’s the only one in the city that I know understands the feeling, when I need to walk out of my skin and make myself feel small in comparison to the buildings and streetlights.
Sometimes I’m too self-aware, and my sense of self is so much that I need to surround myself with something bigger, something unknowable, something too large for me to fully understand. It makes me feel grounded, makes me stop thinking in circles too big to trace. So I walk with Gabby, because she gets it, and we find new places or we just walk down Commonwealth Ave until we get tired, until we aren’t even in the city.
It’s not only the feeling of finding something new. It’s the feeling of truly getting lost, of acknowledging that there is more to the world than what you know. Like looking at the stars, puzzling out constellations and comprehending something you’ve never seen before. There’s some sort of wonder to it, something profound. To put it properly into words would be to lose the magic, so I’ve stopped trying to do it justice, beyond this:
I used to look out over Seaport from the observation deck on Atlantic Avenue, the one where you can see the planes taking off at Logan if you look closely enough. I’d spend enough time up there that the wind would chill my bones, pull my hair back from my face. I’d lean into it and the thoughts whirling inside me would slow. I stopped thinking about how it would feel to fall, and instead thought about how it would feel to fly.
Jamison O'Sullivan is a Boston-based rising senior at Emmanuel College working on a degree in Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She writes both fiction and creative nonfiction, focusing mostly on prose. Her work has been chosen for publication in Emmanuel College's "Saintly Review" magazine and won contests such as the Taylor A. Greene Short Prose Contest at Central Connecticut State University.