Quarantine ended, and I went straight to work.
There was no time to lose—and no way to rush what came next.
The only path that made sense was driving. It gave me the one thing I needed more than money: flexibility. I had to be able to move the moment the borders cracked open, to return and finish what we had left standing.
They talked about incentives like they were guarantees. In practice, the good hours were rare, and every fare lived at the mercy of supply and demand. With so many still working from home, each day became a quiet scavenger hunt.
So I drove. I watched. I learned.
I read the forums. I listened to the complaints. I mapped where the system bent and where it broke—and where a person could still find a little room to move. Days blurred into weeks. Weeks into months. The map in my head grew more detailed than the city itself.
Every night, we spoke—usually into the late twilight. She needed to hear my voice before sleep, a constant frequency from a thousand kilometers away. I needed to know she was still there, still holding the other end of what we had built.
The money was enough to survive. Not enough to grow.
We had married in 2018, after seven years of building side by side. Simple, because we were still climbing. We used to talk about what came next—not as a dream, but as something we would step into when the ground opened again.
I bought the car to keep moving. She kept the place alive to keep waiting.
By then, the future wasn’t something we were building. It was something we were holding.
And the world wasn’t ready to let us go back to it yet.