Migratorius

by Gigi Bell
Art by Eva Long

When you drive for a long time, all you can think about is not driving. Not even thinking about the destination you’re reaching so much as thinking about being somewhere else, or maybe somewhen else. Your mind flickers in ways known only to it, like the unknown forces that guide the crackle of a candle flame, the particular zagging pattern that a bolt of lightning takes, or that mysterious extra sense gifted to migratory birds that ensures they are never lost. You can listen to music, but you are quickly faced with the unmoving monument that is your music taste, and the realization of how few songs you actually like at any given time. Once that resource is exhausted, if you are lucky enough to have traveling companions, you can try conversation. But on a trip as exhaustingly somber as this, nobody can think of much to say. 

You even take a gander at observing some of those birds high in the sky, ink specks so far away that you can’t tell if they’re making some immense journey across their known world or if they’re just taking their equivalent of a walk around the neighborhood. You find this last option to be particularly inadvisable; your contorted form trapped in a wheeled cage makes both you and the birds above unspeakably sad.

You placate yourself with better memories of better journeys that would make the spying birds above jealous of you instead of the other way around. You think about the tour to the French countryside with grass so green that it’s permanently tainted your view of the farmlands back home. You remember Chongqing, China, with its hidden delights such as a faraway city (amusement park? tourist trap?) containing among its curiosities a cat café, a wax museum, and a noodle stand selling transparent glass noodles dripping with a spicy sauce—eye-watering to your American palate. You remember a road trip through Italy, so deeply engraved into your soul that just hearing one of the songs on the playlist you made for the trip (“Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!,” “Sucker,” “The Chain”) throws you back to that bus and the warm sugary taste of the Haribo candy that sustained you hour to hour. 

But inevitably, thoughts of past travels only leave you with a hurt heart and the knowledge that this journey you are taking—this final drive there and back—is probably the last one you are taking for a long time, through no fault of your own (this being the most frustrating part). You don’t want to be making this trip, but it must be done. It is happening earlier than you anticipated. You had already picked a slot to clear the stuff out of your dorm the following week. And though things had been precariously slowing for some time, it suddenly seemed liable to grind to a halt. Many cities have ordered their people to stay indoors. If you don’t get there and back now, you might not get another chance for a long time. 

There aren’t a lot of people out here, which was to be expected, given the circumstances. You are sure this makes this flock of vehicles on the road that you are in now an unwitting member of looking significantly shabbier than its aerial counterparts. What surprises you is that people are making this drive at all. You feel both a little comforted and a little betrayed by the fact that the road ahead demonstrates that you are not alone in the universe. Why are they here? You try and put yourself in their minds. For the truck drivers, you suspect that they are simply out here for the sake of their jobs. The smaller cars are more inscrutable. What reason do they have to be driving? You see those trying to get to their homes, their families. You see those trying to outrun the inevitable. All are frightened, even if they don’t think about it. Like the birds above. Like you. 

You remember a time, months ago, encapsulated in a meme, shared with friends in the dorm lounge on an uneventful night. Some joke about how the world was overdue for another plague, made by some young person in a few minutes for some quick and dirty clout on whichever site it was on—Twitter, probably, its false white bird laughing along with you, or maybe at you. You don’t even remember. You do remember the laughter. Why was it even funny? Why was any of this funny? You definitely don’t remember now. 

You remember a time just a few weeks ago: feeling overwhelmed, on the verge of drowning; like you feared you would during your one fateful semester on your high school’s canoe and kayak team; like a land bird with wet, useless feathers. You remember a harried conversation with someone, it doesn’t matter who, where you said something to the effect of, “God, I just need a break. I just need everything to stop for a few days so I can catch my breath.” Well, someone listened. It seems like some fairy tale or myth—your wish being cruelly twisted before your eyes to the laughter of a vengeful djinn. It adds to the overall feeling inside you that this is all just some low-budget TV show that someone in another dimension is watching idly while doing something more exciting. Nothing feels real—not the sky, not the rolling hills, not the birds above, not even the car—and you begin to wonder if there was ever a time when you weren’t driving. 

When you stop driving, whether at a rest stop or at a hotel for the night or back home when you’re unpacking all your junk from the car, all you can think about is the state of driving. You can feel it intensely; when you sit still after getting home, you feel the pull and sway of the highway, like a weathered sea captain on shore leave. After all that thinking of being elsewhere, all that occupies your mind now is the vehicle that could theoretically take you anywhere, if the country wasn’t about to go on a total lockdown in some faint attempt to contain the spread of the virus. Your mind can’t escape the thought of those intrepid travelers on the road below and in the sky above, compelled to carry on in spite of all obstacles. You wonder how much a bird misses flying once its wings are clipped. 

The moment of your trip that stays with you the most is a rest stop in Nebraska; the sky began to cloud over in brilliant grays, and a flock of birds soared overhead in a line stretching a considerable distance. You remember being in sixth grade and reading about the passenger pigeon. You learned that there were times when a dark sky would not be the responsibility of some amorphous clouds but instead an immense flock of these birds, now forever lost in the annals of time, unable to fly again. You wonder if the last passenger pigeon to fly through the chaotic skies felt the way that you feel right now, knowing that this journey you take is long and hard but wholly unique nonetheless. Once you stop flying, there won’t ever be another like it, because there will never be another one like you to take it.

You like to think that there is still a passenger pigeon or two that all those scientists missed out there somewhere; there were billions of them at one point. Perhaps those cars on the road are those missing pigeons, the last few that were able to slip through the cracks into the great unknown—still carrying on, even if the rest of the flock has left them to seek shelter from an improbable future. After all, there isn’t really much difference between creatures in transit, no matter the form of the journey.