Dear reader,
What do you think about when you’re on a long drive? Do you listen to music, podcasts, or maybe call a friend? Or are you dissociating, staring at the white lines until the rumble strip hits your tire and jolts you into a realization that you haven’t been paying attention to anything for the last who-knows-how-long?
Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, initiating the birth of the American Interstate system as we know it today. We could’ve had high-speed trains, but then again we wouldn't have Diverging Diamond Interchanges… Now, we get to live in a city cleaved in two by I-25, running through the landscape like a visual and auditory scar.
Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do on a weekly basis. We know this; it’s been drilled into us by parents, Driver’s Ed teachers, and car crashes on the side of the road viewed with morbid curiosity and a secret relief that it’s the worst day of someone else’s life, not yours.
So why do we keep driving? For a lot of reasons, according to the writers of this issue. To assert independence, to visit ex-girlfriends, because someone’s paying you to do it. We keep getting behind the wheel (or in the passenger seat) and surrendering control to traffic lights and painted lines because we want to be somewhere other than where we are. Some of us are escaping. Some of us are trying to get somewhere we’ve never been before. Some of us are trying to drive to pasts we’ll never get back to, or to futures that may not exist. Regardless, we keep driving.
Driving isn’t the only way to get from one place to the next. After all, life is mostly spent in flux, with only the security of constant movement to keep you afloat. Plagued by motion sickness, you might find yourself awkwardly hovering between various states of being, trying your best to swim in the gray area. Or perhaps you’re just waiting for a light to turn green, stuck on standby at the crosswalk for what feels like an eternity.
With or without a destination in mind, these writers navigate spaces of in-between with humor, vulnerability, and sharp detail. If your mental state isn’t what you’d like it to be, we hope these stories transport you into a new one. Welcome to the Interstate Issue.
Drive safe,
The Cipher Staff