Interstate 79

Aidan Theriot

Apple CarPlay shines bright in the darkness on the dashboard, you’re trying to find “Sunflower” by Post Malone in a playlist. But you’re going too slow, and an F-150’s high beams remind you of the speed limit. You’re heading into that area of West Virginia where there’s only woods and suspicious looking backroads. You should probably get gas. You go to the only gas station (a questionable looking 7-Eleven) around for miles. 

You’re on the same stretch of road, at the same time, about 4 months later. You haven’t heard Sunflower in a while, this time you’re trying to find “Turn the Page” in a newer playlist (the Metallica one, because it’s better than the Bob Seger one). Once again, your car needs gas, and the same exit as before comes into view. For the second time, you’ve found yourself at this abandoned looking 7-Eleven, and you wonder who even put a 7-Eleven here in the first place. And if they have any recollection of doing so. You’re reflecting on the first semester of college. You really didn’t get very good grades, but you made friends and passed your classes, which is what counts right? You can almost literally see your future appearing in front of you, things clicking into place, that before were floating around bumping into each other aimlessly. 

Several months later you find yourself in front of that same exit again, for the same reason. A friend showed you a song called “1979” over the summer, and you’ve played it multiple times on the drive. The friends in your hometown at different schools are already living off campus and bragging about their apartments while you drive towards a dorm that is somehow smaller than the one from last year. But you really don’t care, you’re just happy to be coming back. 

Like clockwork, about 4 months later, you arrive at the same exit as before. You’ve changed a lot, and switched between several playlists during the drive in a struggle to find something good. The 7-Eleven doesn’t seem to care that time has passed and looks exactly as sketchy as it did a year ago. You feel a weird (and hilarious) tinge of nostalgia for the place.

You’ve been driving this road for two years now. The past few months weren’t bad, but you’ve noticed some things changing. Friendships that seemed rock solid suddenly became much less so. Something must have come by and crashed into the pieces of your future that a year ago had seemed so locked in place. You realize that the 7-Eleven has raised its prices.

Another summer later, the same stretch of I-79. You got tired of all your playlists and tried to use the radio this time, but you gave up the third time you lost a station, you wonder how your parents did this before Spotify was a thing. You’ve made this drive a lot now and are making great time. You don’t need to stop for gas until later than usual. You stop at a different questionable gas station (it has a Little Caeser’s attached to it, which is weird) in the middle of nowhere. Not for the first time, you wonder how in the absolute hell does a place like this stay in business. 

This time you’re at a gas station near your house. You get back into your car after fueling up, and hear “Turn the Page” (the Metallica version of course) on the radio. That must be a good thing. You’ve just had the best semester to date in college, you can actually list your GPA on a resume now. You still haven’t seen your future click together the way you did two years ago, but you’re starting to think that’s okay. 

You figure that it’s probably silly to find meaning in something as forgettable as a gas station, but the (newly) English major in you thinks that maybe it’s not. You realize for the first time that you’re one of those people that you’ve always heard your parents call “twenty-somethings”. You realize that your favorite high school memories happened over four years ago, and you think about how much you have accomplished since then, how different of a person you are now. You look at a Spotify playlist from 2021, you see the remnants of an 18-year-old who drives too slow and is nervous to enter a remote 7-Eleven. For the first time in over two years, you begin to see the pieces of your future moving back into place. 

Interstate 79.