Time to introduce the male protagonist of this thing. A rather humble and unpretentious sort, but he's real. He'd say 'Damn' if he was mildly surprised, and a whole lot more if the situation called for it. He's stoic. He's sparse. He's even cheap though not to a fault, and above all, our guy here is pragmatic. He makes up rules of thumb as he goes through life. Mostly, they're out of humor at himself.
This was originally written to be a four-parter or so, but I have fun with it whenever I look at it, so it might get longer here. Depends on the girl's mood. She's uh, ... well she's changeable, let's say.
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Tobias looked through the wiper blades trying to see a mailbox. He reasoned that if he could only see a farmer's mailbox, then he'd know whether he was still on the road (that he couldn't see), or already in a field. It was an oversimplification he knew, but it was about how he felt. He was used to these squalls and blizzards, but it tended to put him off his game a little when the snowdrifts flew over the hood and windshield of his truck. That had already happened twice this trip and it kind of tests the adrenal glands a little. Across the flatter parts in this screaming wind, he'd driven 57 seconds out of a minute seeing nothing and hoping for another 3 seconds of visibility. Well you have to correct your drift sometime...
Besides that, it was cold tonight. This was the kind of night that the local boys joke about, saying that if you had to pee, you'd better do it walking backwards to make room for the ice you're making.
"I freaking hate storms like this," he said to the steering wheel. It had been bad when he'd left work over an hour ago, and it had gotten worse since. It had taken him three tries to get out of the last town since the police were closing the roads. He wasn't that far from home now, and couldn't help the small smile that crept onto his face.
The truth was that Tobias didn't really mind driving through winter storms all that much, once he was out of the city and off the main highway. With the fools left behind, it wasn't so bad, though this particular storm was being a bitch about it. He listened to the soft whine of the four-wheel drive, and thanked it for being there. His old Dodge was almost fifteen years old, but this was what he had bought it for. He had a full tank of gas and six hundred pounds of sandbags in the bed of the truck. The weight was there for traction. He wasn't in a hurry. He found a speed that would keep him moving and stayed there.
He suddenly remembered a daydream that he'd had when he was back in high school β probably during a geography class, he thought. His mind would do this to him occasionally. He'd have a wild stray thought or memory as he drove that would make him stop and wonder where it had come from. Living where he did, he had lots of time to think.
He remembered that he had thought of just such a night as this. He had thought of being an adult and coming home from work late at night through a snowstorm. In his daydream, he'd even been driving a pickup truck, though he now couldn't remember what it looked like to him then. He'd been intent on getting home, and once finally there, relaxing with a computer for a short while before turning in. He smiled now to remember it. Personal computers were really out on the edge then. Few companies made them then as far as he knew, the IBM PC was just about to revolutionize the average person's life, though no one knew it then. Unknown to Tobias at the time, the fledgling network that would become the internet was just being tinkered with. Looking back, it was such an odd thing to daydream about. It was before he had ever worked an off-shift in his life, and he'd never even driven a pickup truck at the time.
He frowned a little as his memory of it reached the end. It had held no meaning to him then, but he now knew that in his daydream, he would check his email and then turn in. What bothered him now was that at the end, he had come to his home. It was a house. In his daydream, it was paid for, just as his own home was now, since he'd bought the thing with no mortgage. The whole thing was chilling enough, but in real life, there was only one detail missing from the daydream.
There was no woman there to curl up with on a stormy winter night. None of the relationships in his life had lasted long enough for something like that to happen. It was just something that he'd always wanted to do, though he couldn't have explained why it was important to him if asked in a conversation. He couldn't remember the last time that he'd thought of the daydream β if he ever really had since that geography class.
This was the start of a week of vacation now, and the best way that he could think of starting it in a blizzard was that way suddenly. For all he knew, it was something that no one ever thought of, but he did. He never thought of the daydream, but this aspect had always been a long-standing desire for him. He wouldn't care if she was awake and waiting for him or not, just as long as she loved him. That was all he'd want on a night like this. It hadn't happened yet, and he was pretty sure now that it never would.
He turned to drive through the town just south of his own. He didn't usually go this way, but his normal route had a couple of serious hills that he didn't feel like playing with tonight. He drove through the sleeping village and felt like the last man alive on Earth. In that old daydream, he hadn't felt this way at all, but he did now. He was in his late forties and lived alone. He'd never possessed a single outstanding feature to his mind. The difference between what the world saw and what Tobias saw of himself was somewhat skewed. To his mind, he was quite ordinary β just a guy β that's how he thought of himself. In fact, the exertion of his workday and his rather sparse way of living had left him in great physical shape. He just never saw it. He still had his hair, he thought, so that was something. It was a stupid thought that he'd hoped to use to force himself to cheer up with, but it hadn't worked.
He'd always been a bit on the shy side. He covered it well in public, but it had never left him. Whenever he looked back, his almost nonexistent love life had been filled with missed chances, misinterpreted signals, and bad choices. He hadn't had what he had envisioned a real love to be like. They'd never lasted long. After a while, he'd looked it all over and decided that he must be deficient somehow, or just not emotionally equipped to do whatever it was that other people did that made them successful at it. He liked women, but now just thought of them as female people who were probably in their own happy relationships. Even if they weren't, none of them would be interested in him, likely. Finally, it had come to him that evolution was working. Whatever deficiency he had would be gone from the gene pool when he finally took his dirt nap.
He sighed. However hard it had been for him to try at love when he was young, it was much harder now, he knew. He kept to himself, mostly. He wasn't weird or unfriendly, his new neighbors liked him well enough, but he wasn't hanging on their doorbells either. Well, he thought, so that stupid daydream had been a premonition of sorts. Here he was driving through a freaking blizzard in his pickup on his way to his home, which was a house, after all. He knew he'd check his email, and he knew that there wouldn't be any, except for a pile of offers to sell a college degree, or how wonderful his sex life would be again if only he'd buy their little blue pills. He snorted. Yeah, what a wonderful sex life he'd had. He shook his head.
He noted by the tire tracks in front of him that it was coming down worse now, and that there hadn't been anyone past here in a while. He cautiously rolled his shoulders. He was a fairly relaxed driver, but driving through one of these things had a tendency to cause him to pay such attention to the road and the conditions that he didn't perform whatever little things that he normally did automatically to keep his neck and shoulder muscles limber. He only had a few miles left now, so this was the home stretch.
"What the ..."