Kirkwood Highway

[first draft written summer 2021. edited & completed during winter break 2022. much of this is true to my own experiences, but I consider this piece inspired by, rather than a description of, the real place]

Where I come from we call it Kirkwood Highway. 

It’s the road for balding bankers and Toyota corollas, for plumbers trucks, for women in sweatpants who have bought a large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee every day since high school.

It’s the kind of road where you can never remember whether the abandoned Pizza Hut is before or after Burger King, or whether there’s five used car dealerships or six. There’s a whole shopping center between Wendy’s and the Exxon but you couldn’t list any of the businesses there. There’s a mattress store on every corner but I don’t remember any of their names.

My mom once asked me whether there had always been a pawn shop next to the vape shop, or whether that was new, and I realized that I had no idea. It could have been there for days or months or years or decades. 

To drive on Kirkwood Highway is to live in a restless sleep. 

I grew up in a suburb of Wilmington, which is itself a suburb of Philadelphia. I’m from the outskirts of the city that rolls up its sidewalks at 5pm. No one remembers why my neighborhood exists, if there ever was a reason. The number one employer in the state is the state. Most people in Delaware are just… people from Delaware. All we really do is exist. And Kirkwood Highway is that numb hustle between the city and the suburbs, between meaningless houses and purposeless jobs.

There are no bookstores or cafes on Kirkwood Highway. The only greenery is the weeds that grow between beer bottles and cigarette butts in neglected medians. Kirkwood Highway is just a way to get home. There’s nothing except fast food chains and gas stations and used car dealerships and lenders—just enough to fuel you and your car and keep you driving between work and home.

When I first went away to college, a boy from L.A. asked me what people in Delaware do for fun. “Drugs,” I had said. Sure, there’s adult stores and vape shops and dilapidated liquor marts—but these things are just as extractive as the pawn shops and lenders and plasma donation centers.

People here don’t have fun.

The thing is that when you’re driving Kirkwood Highway, you can’t afford to ask why. You’re waking up too early to need a reason for getting out of bed. You’re getting too little sleep to ever truly wake up. You’re too busy surviving to ask what you’re living for.

I get the feeling that rich people call this being poor, and I don’t always have the heart to tell them that this is what most of America is like. 

When you’re driving Kirkwood Highway you have to be sober enough to get to work but too numb to ask why. Frail roadside crosses mark every intersection, and a sign in front of the police station lists the ever-climbing number of alcohol-related fatalities. 

And this is what scares me most: you don’t even realize that you’re driving on Kirkwood Highway until it’s too late. When I was in high school I rode the school bus every morning and I’d look down into the cars around us and realize that every driver was texting or snapchatting or  even watching YouTube or filming TikToks. Cars fly through red lights and wait at green lights because we’re too distracted to be hopeless. We’re all asleep at the wheel because that’s the only way we can keep driving. 

When life is just an endless cycle of working so you can drive so you can eat so you can work, you have to stay half-asleep because if you ever saw life for what it really is you wouldn’t be able to keep going. 

When I lay awake in bed at night I listen to a silence so heavy it becomes its own sound. But sometimes I can hear the Mustangs and Ferraris ripping down Kirkwood Highway, racing through red lights into the void, tearing around the corners, chasing God or death or a high more powerful than despair.

It’s the ambulances, not the police, that follow them. If you drive fast enough, you can leave it all behind. 

The next morning my parents will shake their heads at the shattered windshields and shards of fenders scattered across the road, but if this is life and that's all there is I would be ready for the next one too. I’d rather end it all in a lime green Camaro with my best friend and a six pack than shuttle to work in my mom’s Honda everyday until I end up in the funeral home behind Chipotle. 

If life is this cheap, you might as well have fun. 

When I was a teenager I promised myself that I’d never drive Kirkwood Highway. I need so much more than just living and dying and working. I want to wake up, sober up, because if I can’t find out what makes life worth living I’m already dead. 

I didn’t know anything about the world beyond Kirkwood Highway, but I thought—maybe life means something out there. Maybe there’s a city with lights bright enough to keep me awake. 

And in the years since then I’ve seen places with cafes and museums and fountains and boutiques. There are cities with more than drive-thrus and gas stations. There are places in this country where life is more than strip malls and suburbs and unquestioning complacency. 

But I’ve come to realize that I’m not really afraid of a road, I’m afraid of despair—and despair isn’t a zip code. 

I met the people who are on top of the world and realized that they’re still driving Kirkwood Highway, too. They’re still living for weekends they drink away, struggling for families they don’t have the time to love, toiling endlessly because working is easier than asking why. 

The hustle doesn’t end when you cross the city limits. You can’t escape Kirkwood Highway by driving it any faster. 

I don’t really know how to get off Kirkwood Highway, but I think you have to find something worth living for. You have to have a reason to get out of bed, get off your phone, fight through the icy withdrawal that separates this fuzzy, comfortable, purposeless world from the stinging clarity of a life worth living. Being alive is terrifying and exhilarating and cold and hard and real and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. 

So if you find yourself stumbling through a living death, sleepwalking between work and home, slipping into addictions again, snoozing your alarms and promising yourself that maybe, someday, you’ll do the things you’re afraid of—you’re driving Kirkwood Highway. 

Wake up.