We all drink a little before heading to Whataburger, the one along I-10. Justin insists that he’ll remain sober, thank God. Last time we drank together, before we went off to school, he vandalized my notebook with shitty raps. For some reason, he seems a little less fluid today—his movements more jagged than usual, his words more settled. I wonder if he had a long semester or just a long day. Perhaps the fluidity was merely an artifact of his once long, curled hair, the ends of which have now been almost completely chopped off.
I turn to Arhan when, as per the norm, he offers to drive. He’s always been the most functional while under the influence—often better than a sober Justin. Whether that functionality is a product of years of acting sober to his parents or just some liquid confidence, I never had a clue. He got us through Rolling Loud, so we trust him. Every thought that enters his mind seems to be filtered into a specific lane, like trains filing onto their separate tracks. At any given moment, only one or two would present themselves at the station. Listening to him speak is sometimes like listening to a verse from a sonnet, as if it were written by some modern Shakespeare; other times, it’s like listening to an infant. He’d grown out his facial hair over the last few months, and for the first time, I realized how piercing his eyes are. You could almost see the trains rolling to a stop. This observation, in tandem with the wisdom bestowed upon him by his new beard, instills in me a semblance of comfort as the three of us stumble into his ’06 Acura.
Getting onto the I-10 involves a merge across five lanes within only a couple hundred feet—a prime example of Houston’s notoriously bad city planning. It used to plague my daily life, but it’s home. I typically avoid this particular maneuver by waiting until after the first traffic light to merge, but Arhan chooses to weave through the 4,000-pound bullets like Neo from “The Matrix.” In that instant, the streetlamps paint radiant beams across my vision, and I feel every jerk of the steering wheel through the seat belt digging into my shoulder. All I know for certain is that we made it onto the highway.
As we proceed into the darkness, I’m reminded of the endlessness of the highway by the repeating emergence and passing of green exit signs. I lean back and let the bass of the music sink into my chest. Before it settles in, Arhan notes that Kid LAROI’s voice really cuts through the rest of the track, like a cold knife sawing through a stick of room-temperature butter. For a moment, I’m concerned. I’m concerned about why he thinks of room-temperature butter when he listens to Kid LAROI, but more urgently, I’m concerned that the focus needed to conjure such an observation was drawn from the pool of energy that was supposed to be solely devoted to keeping the car straight. Thankfully, when I look over, his eyes are still locked onto the car ahead of us. They’re half open but unwavering—we’re good, I think.
I go back to what Arhan said: The knife really is cold, and its edge is a little uncomfortable. And so, as the next song comes on, I try to mimic a fraction of his genius. Juice WRLD’s voice, when compared to LAROI’s, is perhaps a bit sharper than a butter knife, more like, say, a printmaker’s chisel: carving through the music as if it were a block of linoleum.
In the mirror, I see a myriad of cars coasting along the several lanes of Katy Freeway, all following the natural rhythm of the world. The highways are the grooves in the linoleum of the city—a previously blank slab etched with purpose and fated to be exploited again and again. The highways are Houston’s arteries, the cars its blood, bringing life to all parts of the city: to a loved one, to the familiar embrace of home or to a Whataburger. The cars remind me that everyone’s life is its own world, that each of the vehicles that pass by, or cruise alongside us, carry a soul whose experiences are vast and unknowable.
I take a swig out of the flask we brought along. The cool, smokey whiskey, gently infused with a metallic tang from the flask, is smoother than I expect it to be. I feel the volume of the gulp as it grazes my throat, and it warms me the way a freshly brewed cup of coffee might. Looking out through the glass, I’m flooded by a profound sense of purpose. There isn’t an absence of cars, per se—that doesn’t really exist in Houston—but compared to the usual discord, it’s quite peaceful to be among the others in the dead of night. It’s as though each and every wheel on the vehicles that envelop us is working in some grand symphony, spinning the globe underneath us, such that it is not the passengers which move through the world, but rather the world itself which is being pulled through us.
As downtown inches closer, I’m struck by the vibrancy of its skyline. That vibrancy is complemented by the abrupt shifting of the asphalt into the concrete beneath us. I let the vibrations of the tires against the surface of the road blend with the percussion of the music. Almost instantaneously, I’m taken to a beach. The drums are like waves rolling onto the shore, one after another. With each kick and snare, I feel the water, with its chaos and vigor, crashing into the sand, forever changing the landscape of the beach. The face of the shore between each beat presents as a wholly unique arrangement of the grains of sand, lost to all except the memories of the sand itself, preserved only in the architecture of the individual grains. With every strike of the water, each grain is caressed by erosion, forged one ostensibly negligible stroke at a time. Change approaches in these ebbs and flows, weatherings and slow gatherings. It compounds, sneaks up and reveals itself to us when we least demand it. We hide from these changes, gripping desperately onto who we imagine ourselves to be, rather than who we feel is becoming unearthed by the oceans of our lives; they find us nonetheless. Perhaps by the end of the song, the shoreline will have taken on an entirely new character.
It’s bizarre how different everyone looks compared to just a few months ago. It’s a feeling which resurfaces every time I go home and, I imagine, every time anyone goes home. I look more carefully and notice that Justin has a new chain and that Arhan wears a different watch. I wonder if these changes are meant to signal some kind of growth, or if they’re to hide that they haven’t really changed at all. After all, there is this automatic association between how someone looks and who they are—their external and internal selves—that all of us try, but ultimately fail, to escape. To say that Arhan’s hair had grown longer and that Justin’s hair had become shorter is not to say that they had somehow diverged on their paths in life. But sometimes, thoughts like those are hard to avoid. Another thought which haunts me is this: The number of opportunities for us all to be together diminishes each time we hang out. What, then, becomes of home? This thought pulls down on the corners of my mouth as it crawls its way into my mind.
I like to imagine some poignant, distant future where all my friends, pulled in by chance or by effort through different roads of fate, come together and pour each other drinks as we reflect on the things that have had the greatest impact on our lives. I like to imagine those things are always people.
As we pull into Whataburger, I’m taken out of my trance. There’s some noise coming from the back seat, a disturbance seeping in and out of the music. It’s Justin, the sober one, freestyling, trying to rhyme words like “pe-nis” and “wee bit” together. As it turns out, he hasn’t changed at all.
“Did you hear that, bruh?” I say to Arhan.
“Hear what?”