I learned to drive last year. One small breakable thing with her hands on one narrow wheel which supposedly controls other, bigger wheels which drive and direct this massive, dangerous machine. Sitting inside a vehicle which at any moment could turn to weapon and destroy you and those around you. Like a fast-moving potential suicide bomb. Hands on the wheel. Like you’re in control. You’ve got it covered. You’ve got the power. You direct this force. No problem. People drive every day.

As soon as I began to learn to drive, the entire illusion of control revealed itself to me as the lie we feed ourselves everyday so we don’t all just end it quick and painless, like maybe we should. So we keep driving to work or to school, keep applying for jobs, searching for lovers and partners, so we keep waking up and falling asleep and paying our taxes and calling our moms. No. We’re in control. We’re going somewhere. We’re moving. We’re traveling. We drive the car. The car doesn’t drive us. We’ve got our seatbelts on. Our airbags. Our anti-lock brakes. We’re safe.

And we’re driving, right? I’ve got my learner’s permit and my partner’s asleep on the passenger side, feeling calm and confident that I’ve got it down and I notice that as I go over potholes or rough ground, the wheels, all of ‘em, want to get away from me a little bit. No, maybe they do get away from me a little bit. Because the ground’s got more control over the car than I do, really, but everybody, everything understands that humans need to feel like they’re in control so they don’t say much of anything, they just go on doing what they do and maybe the humans don’t notice how the car pulls away from them when the ground gets rough, like it’s got other allegiances or something. Now, maybe the human notices. And her grip on the wheel gets tighter. More tense. Her knuckles, her tiny wrists, the almost sweat on her palms which might allow her hands to slip. She mustn’t lose control, now, she is the driver. That must mean something. To somebody. In charge.

Or maybe it happens coming around a corner. On an off-ramp, let’s say and the rails are close and for a moment you fear you underestimated the angle of the curve, took the turn too fast, could skid into the rail or crash into a car in the next lane as you slip out of yours because you didn’t decelerate fast enough. Because you didn’t know or didn’t see or weren’t paying attention or weren’t being cautious or you were late or you’ve gone this way a million times and you thought you were in control even with your eyes half closed or talking on the phone or reading the billboards or singing along to the song on the radio, thought you were in control, but the wall or the rail or the next lane over approaches too fast and you have a moment, a single indelible flash of fear that you might not be as in control as you think.

And maybe that’s when I think of Jen. Jen O’Hare. 19. Who lost control of her car. That’s what they wrote in the paper. In the reports. In the poems. I mean, who knows, who wasn’t there, exactly what that looked like. Losing control. Did the wheel get out of her hands, did she misjudge the speed coming around the bend, did the anti-lock brakes suddenly lock, did the power steering suddenly stop providing the power, did the gas become the brake or the brake become the gas, did a bottle of water roll from the floor of the back seat to the floor of the driver’s side seat and lodge itself under the accelerator so that it didn’t go when she needed it to go? I mean what happened to my friend three years ago who isn’t here anymore who lost control?

I know the car outside of her control carried her off the highway across the grassy median into the path of the highway traffic on the other side. I know she died. I know when I hold onto the narrow little wheel, I don’t have control. I have limited cooperation. I have hope and terror and desperation. I have a tight grip on a volatile weapon and insufficient muscle and sweat lubricating the dangerous little bundle. I have flashes of death at every off ramp, every big bump and rocky, rough pot-holed stretch of pavement. Not to mention recurring nightmares. Verifiable. Blue-sky, stop light, and my car pointing towards a highway to the left of a swift-rising mountainside. Green light and we go, but I’m not in control. We fly through the intersection, fly like float super-fast like ethereal speed surreal like something real humans just don’t do. Through the light and into the sky, not high off the ground, maybe a foot or two and right into the rocky mountainside. And I would wake shaking and crying and dead. Not in control.

And sometimes it’s a vehicle you’re driving and sometimes it’s your life or your self or your grip on reality or your sanity or your balance or your calm or your joy. You’ve got a grip on your sanity and enough desperate sweat that it could slip at any minute, drive your calm over a cliff, your happiness with it.

No no no. You’re driving, you’re flying like eighty miles an hour through life, got through high school, college, got your degree, the so-called real world was just more stimulus, billboards and blimps and lights and high-speed nighttime driving, more people in the car, deeper conversations, cell-phones, and sex with one leg on the dash, one eye on your girl and one makin sure you don’t crash-you are going someplace, moving, traveling, making your way, and what happens? What was it? The rough patch of highway that pulled your vehicle away from you. The under-anticipated curve. The momentary distraction, the confusion, the bottle blocking your foot from the pedal that would make it all stop if you told it to.

What happens when you lose control, when you lose your grip on the illusion that you’ve got it all covered, that you’re traveling, that you’re safe, that you’re sound, that you’ve got this whole life-business down. And what does it look like, that coming unhitched?

Tonight it was nothing but the same job that doesn’t do it, the neverending fear that I blew it, that I’m useless, that all that potential everybody’s kept jamming down my throat has finally choked me, that I’m broken, that I’m stuck in a rut, tires spinning in mud or snow, that I’m flying blind right into a mountainside. Losing my grip on hearbeat and breath. On sanity and reality and calm. We’re just humans, after all, just fools with an illusion of control. Just fast-moving potential suicide bombs.

Every word lain down is a stab at regaining centeredness and calm. Is a finger squeezing tighter to the wheel. A ragged attempt just to hold it together, to hang onto the wheel that directs the power, to drive in a straight line and not into a mountainside, to keep the cooperation of all this volatile machinery I’m built out of-bone and steel and sweat and desperation and hunger and wickedness and heat and desire and heart and laughter and fire and drive and inertia and empathy and sex and playfulness and blood and saline and flesh and breath and passion-it’s my attempt to keep from smashing into anything more solid or vulnerable than me.

I’ve seen death that comes at the hand of the illusion of control. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to die that way.