The end was zooming towards us, laying only hours away. The road is blackened all but a few feet in front of the headlights as the seemingly infinite Texas sky engulfs the travelers in the tiny tired van below. I couldn’t see it yet. but the end was zooming closer and closer.

Time seemed to hang in the starlit road, as hours were gained and lost and paused as we zoomed though time zones, construction zones, and twilight zones. Driving makes me feel as infinite as the sky. But infinity is a big place.

I embarked on this blog, and this journey, to write about adventure, expectantly my own. I wanted to write what it feels like to be a young American post-grad mixing manifest destiny, the post college road trip and the age of instant information. I wanted this blog to be about the smell of cornfields, hidden highways, kids making sand castles, and broken windows. I wanted it to be about West Coast juggling rivalries and Katrina survivors. I wanted to see it all with my own eyes, write everything down, and truly have felt the depth and breadth of my foray into the vast American countryside. A blog about crossing distances both digital and physical. But one distance I realized I haven’t yet crossed is the distance to myself.

The plan for this journey was hatched on a back porch in Tucson a few days after I graduated college. After I flipped my tassel and got my paper I was facing an existential meltdown. The “real world” had been like a runaway train barreling towards me for weeks, and after all the confetti cleared from my moment of triumph, I felt instantly lost. My whole life up to that point had a plan. Grade school, high school, college. Check check check. Done. Sitting on that porch I realized I had absolutely nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it in. It was the most liberating and terrifying feeling of my life. So I decided to do what I always dreamed of - go on “the trip of a lifetime” across the country. So I did. I turned that dream into a project. A blog. A journey. An admittedly overly romanticized vision quest.

But what happens when you reach the end of that? What do you do when all that’s left is a few more miles? The end of the trip, the end of what I’d hoped would be my answer. The true end of all the plans I’d made up to this point in my life.

What happened was the Texas sky scooped me up and kept me there, lost and still looking down the last stretch of road.