It was night. Everyone in the car was quite. The radio was shut. Just the sounds of the rain and the raindrops splashing from under the tires merged in a measured hiss.
The rain was drumming on the roof of the car whooshing with the wind gusts and flooding the windscreen. The wipers were rhythmically counting down the kilometres on the speedometer. Rare road lights were floating in the dark glass.
My wife and kids were asleep. There were no thoughts, but my feelings were turning me inside out.
Fear was weighting heavily on my chest. My legs, hands and back were being squeezed here and there. But I needed to complete the route, and therefor to remain calm and focused, leaving the fears behind. A steady breathing, a quite hum of the engine, warm air of the heater blowing, and everything seemed fine.
Suddenly, I felt a twitch of terror. In the left side glass where it was damp and dark, a face with a horrible look appeared and vanished at once. I started to look there using my side vision and found that the face appeared again and again, reflected in the headlights of the oncoming cars.
They were the faces of phantoms of fears and ghosts of doubts that were chasing me away from themselves, straight to the goal I’d set for myself.
I was the one who’d set the goal but those faces reflected in the glass looked at me reproachfully. They obviously didn’t like what I was doing.
– Where are you heading, what do you need there? Stay quite and get yourself a job.
– Provide for the family. You have to be hard-working, and humble.
– Go see the doctor, you’re sick! Enough daydreaming. Do something useful!
I kept staring in that glass as if it was a mirror trying to figure out who he was. That ghost who was saying all those false things so insistently. But the raindrops painted oblique stripes on the glass so I couldn’t see his face very well. The oncoming car showed again, again there were headlights, and a new ghost appeared in the glass.
– Travelling abroad – what a bullshit! There’s nothing fascinating there.
– People there are dull and hostile. You haven’t even seen everything here yet!
– You love you homeland, you are a patriot! You don’t want to leave it at all. You’re fine here. Where you were born is where you belong.
I didn’t want to look at that wet left mirror anymore.
My responsibility and mindfulness made me look ahead, keep my eyes on the road, notice everything that was going on around. To see objects and signs clearly.
But the ghosts were trying to distract me from the windscreen and kept insisting:
– How are you going to travel? What about the kids? How are you going to love your wife? You only have 15 minutes a day left for all that. Your work takes the rest of the day. You have to provide them a better life.
– Your life will always be miserable and dull. That’s why you have to work hard so that they could have the best. So that one day you could change it all. But you need money for that. You have to work!
It started to drive my crazy! When a new ghost appeared in the glass, unable to make it disappear, I started yelling at it mentally in a state of despair:
– No! These are not my words! Not my thoughts! Who are you? Answer me!
The ghost was silent. And I felt like that was over. But there it was again – an ongoing car lightened the glass with the headlights. And once again the ghost stared at me with its heavy slanted gaze.
And again I didn’t manage to see him well. If I turn around and look him in the eye, there will be a crash. And that’s not just my death. It would be death of everything I care about.
Calming myself, I slowly turned the wheel and made a turn. There was darkness around the corner. And in the darkness there was fortune.
A string of the oncoming cars on a straight line.
All of a sudden time slowed down and I went numb with fear. The ghost reappeared in the reflection of the headlights of the first oncoming car and it was…
Christ!
– Mom! You? – before I could say it, the headlights of the second car illuminated another face.
– Father! – my heart nearly jumped out of my chest. I looked through the glass again.
– Granny! You? So, it was you? – but the headlights of a string of the oncoming cars kept swapping faces.
Among them were people I didn’t know. Grandmothers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers.
Many of them looked like me, others were so distorted I could only see their images.
They all looked at me with their judgemental, gloomy, slightly caustic looks and devilishly squinted eyes.
Some were quietly moving their lips, uttering their horrific mantras:
– You are useless freak!
– You are worthless!
– You’re going to be a pauper your whole life!
– You’re going to be sick forever.
– You are filthy and wretched.
Who could it be? There were mom and dad among them.
Were they holding me back from moving to my goal?
Did they want me to crash on the way to my dream?
No way!
After all, they have always wished me well.
Once more there were oncoming headlights, once more my dad’s face:
– Son! Forgive me!
I looked to the left, but dad wasn’t there already. I started to realise why my dad had appeared with a guilty look.
His thoughts and beliefs didn’t belong to himself. And most of the beliefs of my ancestors didn’t belong to them either.
All that was imposed to them by others: parents, tutors, stepmothers, teachers, the laws of war, the fears and joys of a low-key life, by lack of education and ignorance, unwillingness to read and analyse.
And just like that, both of them repeated the same destructive affirmations time after time and life after life.
Each of them fell for the exhortations of propaganda and false convictions over and over again.
I realised a dreadful thing. And the rain started to go through the windscreen right into the car, down onto my eyes. Tears covered vision, I started to catch my breath.
I stopped the car on a sidewalk and stepped out into the rain. I wanted to wash all those unnecessary fears, bad thoughts and heavy beliefs away.
I wiped my face with hands and looked around. The door slammed, Sveta appeared at the side of the road.
Squinting and bending under the raindrops, she came up to me, and I hugged her with one arm, looking out into the night glow of the large city that stretched out before us, covered by a dense layer of rain clouds.
– I saw ghosts, and they were trying to convince me that I was a talentless, idle, fool – I said quietly, and looked at my wife.
– It happens. I see them often too when I think about how worthless I could be. The last time it was my grandmother. She apologised that she couldn’t understand at once that the beliefs she had inherited from her forefathers turned out to be false.
That she died never saying she loved her daughter or me. That was all her life busy with her foolish work and hateful house duties. Was busy with whatever but the most important thing.
That each time she tried to establish relationships with others she didn’t know that first of all one has to establish relationships with oneself.
She grieved and thought she wanted to live her life that way. In fact, though, deep down she only wanted to give us as much attention as we needed. So that my mom would do the same and would not abandon me when I was still very young and needed her so much.
I now realise that everything is in the past, that it takes a lot of time,
effort and courage to stop this sensual meat grinder
that was launched many centuries ago.
But you know what, she said it wasn’t worth it. She told me to keep doing everything to change the dire situation.
And ever since I met you she has never come to me again.
We were on the sidewalk under the rain and looked at the night sky. Another hard day was left behind. A mound spread ahead, beyond it – a highway and Italian countryside. Silence enveloped the deserted night city.
– Whats’s this? – Sveta asked, wiping the damp hair with her hand.
– Triest. Which means ‘sad’, – I replied and chuckled.
– Yeah, this is sad, indeed!
We had driven through the rain and that was the hardest part of the journey. From there we will head straight to our dream. Head to the Balkans, where we’ll stay for quite a long time. We’ll head towards light and joy. Right to the South.