Highway Part 48

Highway Chapter 23(continued)

The more I watched her, the more concerned I was. Was she sick? Maybe she was sleep walking, but laying down. No, that wasn’t it. If she sleep walked, she would have done it before. Not to say I was awake all the time, but I was a light enough sleeper to know when someone was moving around me.

I tried to gain some information by sensing her, and it struck me. There was an anomaly that hadn’t been there before. I felt the sensation increase, and I realized what was happening. She was awakening.

Could it happen so soon? She’d been with me for a little over two weeks. I thought I might be wrong, but the feeling was unmistakable. I could practically feel her connecting to nature, her consciousness expanding by the second. She was transforming, just like a caterpillar in its cocoon.

I suppose I hadn’t figured it out earlier because I hadn’t ever seen someone awaken directly. The girl I traveled with before had hers one night when we were at a hotel. She hadn’t even gotten up, at least not to my knowledge. I had always been under the impression one needed to be outside for it to happen, but apparently not.

Worried I might disturb Veronica's metamorphosis, I didn’t know if I should do something. She looked rather uncomfortable, understandably, but I thought I could ease her discomfort a little if she wasn’t laying on rock. Very carefully, I shifted her head off of the ground and onto my leg.

There, perhaps she’ll escape some pain. Awakening is an experience like no other. You can feel yourself become a part of something bigger, and you can sense the life around you. As amazing as it is, it has a tendency to be painful as well. Every drifter I’ve talked to agrees, and so it must just be a part of the process.

It pushes the limits of the human brain, unlocking some part that had been closed off before. It hasn’t been used before, or at least not very much, so it becomes a hot spot of activity. Just like when you learn something for the first time, especially as a young child, your head hurts a little. Take that, and multiply it a few times to try and understand what it feels like.

I settled in for a while, getting comfortable. The process always took at least a few hours. We haven’t ever figured out why, but some believe that the brain is adjusting to its newfound discovery. Nobody has ever died when they awakened, but we wonder if something bad would happen were someone to be interrupted.

The state a person enters as they begin to change is almost like a trance. The body shuts down as if it’s asleep, only focusing on what’s happening. Just like Veronica was now, the body is still, except for some slight twitching in many cases. So, it isn’t very easy to stop the process, but it might be possible.

Many worry that the brain wouldn’t be able to take the sudden warp back to reality, and that the person would go into shock. This could mean the brain shutting off the area for a long time, if not forever, causing the person to be cut off from awakening. Or, some hypothesize it could end up even worse, possibly even in death. We never tried to stop someone, for obvious reasons, and so we still didn’t know what would happen.

I can remember my awakening clearly. Julian and I were out on the road, and I began to feel strange. I wandered through the forest with the excuse of needing a walk. I ended up nestling myself between a boulder and a mossy tree. Julian found me 10 minutes later, or so he said. He understood what was happening right away, as he was more experienced and had seen it happen to others many times before.

I “woke up” a few hours later, an entirely different person. Your core values and personality are still there, but you are a different person. In some, the effects seem mild, perhaps just being generally happier. Others, like me, were totally transformed.

I was a bitter person, especially since it was so close to Johnny’s death. But after my awakening, I was hardly angry at anything. I had found peace when I awakened, and it made me a much calmer and more patient person. But I underwent just as much change when I met Veronica.

While it was true I was calmer and not angry, I wasn’t quite as happy as I should have been. My life was wonderful, and I was grateful for the gift I had been given, but it was lonely. I had merely accepted this as the sacrifice I had to make to receive such a gift, but I didn’t realize it didn’t have to be that way.

She was so strange, so different, and so spunky. I had met other drifters, but never anyone like her. She had a habit of making me laugh more often, and making my smiles come easier. She had filled in the void of loneliness I had in my heart, for now it only had our mutual care for each other. She had changed my life, and I hoped I had changed hers. The only question now was whether she would stay.

She had expressed interest in staying, and I desperately wanted her to. But as I’ve said before, drifters haven’t ever stayed together before. I was worried she would come to and decide that she needed to travel after all. I would support her decision, of course, but I was going to be absolutely devastated if she left. I really shouldn’t have gotten so close to another drifter, but it happened before I knew it.

She wriggled her way into my heart. No, she didn’t do that.

It was more like she busted down my ventricle wall, exclaiming, “Hey, Matt! I’m here, and that’s just how it’s going to be. Boy, this place sure is cozy!”

Okay, she probably wouldn’t say boy anything, but still. But something told me that she wouldn’t leave. She had seemed so upset about even the idea of leaving the night of her kidnapping. She could change her mind, but I doubted she would. She may change radically like me, but her basic feelings were still going to be there.

I watched the night sky change colors, lost in my own musings. I would check on Veronica every now and then, feeling the change in her soul. I was reassured that everything seemed to be going okay, and that I could start to sense her better by the minute.

Drifters had such a unique connection when they were fully fledged, so much that we didn’t need to talk about feelings to understand them. Not to say we didn’t talk to each other, we did, it’s just that our conversations weren’t about trying to get each other to understand what we were feeling. We were just as connected to each other as we were to nature, if not more.

As the sky began to lighten and the sun peeked curiously over the horizon, Veronica began to stir. Her connection faltered for a moment, then exploded into mine.

It was like her mind was a flood, and it had just broken the dam that was mine. I could feel everything, even the slight sleepiness she was experiencing. As she stirred again, I waited.

She opened her eyes.