Plano, Texas

By Ava Stern

        My notes app is filled with reflections on the mundane. When a moment feels — for some reason — profound, I attempt to bottle the feeling into precise words to remind myself what made it so special. I let the feeling flow through me and into my fingertips, letting them fly across my phone screen with abandon, hoping to capture something like the truth. I document when the sun’s light hits a building in a particularly unusual way, or when the song on my shuffle sounds exactly like the weather. By doing this, I decorate my objectively colorless life with pocks of profundity, of beauty.

        Plano, Texas is not a conventionally beautiful place. My childhood there largely consisted of strip malls and McDonald’s play places. Not to say it was a bad childhood, it wasn’t. I experienced all the regular joys of fighting with my brother and riding my bike in aimless loops. As I grew older, however, I started to realize that the goings-on of the world were occurring in some interminable somewhere else. Not in my quiet corner of Texas. As a teen, of course, this was impossible for me to live with. New York, I cried. I’m coming to live! To experience! 

        I felt trapped in my eternal monotony by long, straight drives. Every morning, I drove twenty-five minutes down the same road to school, and twenty-five minutes back. Preston Road. Each fast-food chain and every gas station along that unwavering road lines my memory, intertwined with the jingle for 106.1 Kiss F.M. 

        My sixteenth birthday, in the context of these drives, was a rebirth. Driving alone elicited a revelation of complete solitude that I didn’t know I was craving. As long as I drove down Preston Road, my inner world was left completely unmarred. I could blast my music until the speakers buzzed, screaming, crying, hitting my steering wheel. There’s a safety in solitude. Emotional vulnerability, a nearly impossible feat in my opinion, was easy during these 25 minutes. I knew that the second I walked into school, where at that time I had a grand total of one friend, I would have to reassemble my mask. Adolescent me was very concerned with fitting in, as many of us are at that age. But these drives were my safety valve. I would create fictional scenarios, act them out with my windshield reflection as a scene partner. My fellow drivers were no concern; they had a completely different destination. Aloneness, loud music, the feeling of going somewhere – I’m not entirely sure what it was. All I know is that my curated, observable self is not the person who drives my car.




        This is how I came of age in my Subaru Outback. Words and melodies flowed from my car speakers to envelop me in their embrace. Suddenly, I wasn’t driving down Preston, I was in Dazed and Confused, smoking a joint on the last day of school. Plano turned to Paris, Texas as I pulled into a gas station, “Paint it Black” blaring under a scarlet sky. My humdrum town was transformed by Ziggy Stardust, by “Boys Don’t Cry.” Maybe this is the way Texas gives back to us. The hot, flat aggregation of suburbia that raised me also provided me with a sense of pure aloneness that allowed me to escape into my own mind. You can’t get that in a taxicab.■