The Drive Home at Seven

Twenty two minutes if the lights cooperate, which they mostly do at seven in the morning because nobody else is out yet except the actual commuters, the ones starting their day instead of ending it. I take 51 most of the way, then cut through the South Hills on side streets I could probably drive with my eyes closed at this point, which is not something I should probably admit to writing down.

The sun is the whole problem. Twelve hours of fluorescent light does something to your eyes that daylight punishes you for the second you step outside, so I keep sunglasses in the car year round, including January, including at 7am when it’s fifteen degrees and the sun is barely up over the tree line. People must think I’m being dramatic. I am not being dramatic. Ask any night nurse.

There’s a gas station about halfway that I stop at more mornings than not, not really for gas, for the coffee, which is objectively bad and exactly what I want at that hour. Something about a drip coffee that’s been sitting on a burner since 5am matches the mood better than anything good would. The guy who works that shift and I have never exchanged more than four words total in three years, but we nod at each other like we’ve got an understanding, because in a way we do. Both closing out overnight shifts. Both about to go be unconscious while the rest of the world eats breakfast.

The radio matters more than it should. I don’t listen to anything with lyrics on that drive, can’t handle words yet, so it’s either silence or something instrumental, and lately it’s been the same three albums on rotation because picking something new at that hour feels like a decision I don’t have the reserves for. The brain is doing this thing on the drive home where it’s still partially at work, replaying whatever the shift handed it, and partially already asleep, and the drive is the only twenty two minutes where both of those are happening at once and nothing is asked of me.

I’ve had exactly one close call on that drive in three years, drifted a little in my lane on 51 about a year in, and it scared me straight into a rule I still follow, no drive home if I haven’t eaten something real in the last four hours, doesn’t matter how late that makes me. Coffee doesn’t count. Learned that one the hard way and I’m not eager to relearn it.

By the time I pull into my spot the sun’s usually fully up and doing its worst, mocking me a little, and I go inside and close every blackout curtain in the place like I’m locking down a building. Which, in a sense, I am.