On long drives, what kept me going was a ghost story.
Somewhere past the second hour, the coffee always gave up on me.
Back then, long drives were a normal part of my life. Three hours in the car, sometimes four. Well over a hundred kilometres one way, sometimes two hundred. Day or night, it didn’t matter. The road was long either way.
And like most people, I had one answer for heavy eyes.
Coffee.
Sometimes I made it myself before we left. Sometimes it was made for me. Sometimes it was a can of coffee from whatever petrol station I stopped at.
And it worked. That was the trouble.
On a short trip, coffee did exactly what I wanted. My eyes opened up. My head felt clear. I felt sharp enough for the whole journey.
So I trusted it. I trusted it on every drive, short or long, and I never asked whether it was doing the same job on both.
It wasn’t.
On the long ones, the coffee had a time limit. For a while I was fine. Then, somewhere along the highway, it simply wore off. The road was still there. Hours of it. And the one thing I had brought to fight the tiredness was already used up.
I had treated coffee like the whole plan. It was only ever the start of one.
What changed it for me didn’t come from a book. It came from a rented house.
Years before, I shared a rented house with an older housemate. At night, he used to put on recordings of an old Singapore radio show, Misteri Jam 12, or MJ12. Ghost stories. Cerita hantu. Some were sent in by listeners and read out by the host. Some came from callers who phoned the studio and told their own.
The first time I heard it, I wasn’t sure. The second and third time, I started to listen properly. After a while I caught myself thinking, eh, okay, this is actually good.
The host in those years, DJ KC, made that show come alive. To me, he was its soul. His Malay was the Singapore kind, formal and careful, the kind that takes you back to old P. Ramlee films. Years later, the old recordings were put up on YouTube, and that is where I listened to them.
That is what I ended up playing on the long drives.
And something happened that coffee had never done.
As each story was told, I started to build it in my head. Where did it happen? A block of flats. Which floor? There was a grandfather and a grandmother. Then an uncle. How was the uncle connected to them? Why was the friend part of it at all?
I couldn’t help it. My brain kept turning over, like the gears of an engine. One question led to the next, and every new question kept me with the road a little longer.
However sleepy I was, I could keep going to where I needed to be.
A good conversation did the same thing. On the drives where someone beside me was awake and we got into a topic we both cared about, the kilometres just disappeared. Before I knew it, we had arrived.
But most of the time, I was the only one awake. Everyone in the back was asleep. There was nobody to talk to.
That is when the stories came on. And if a child in the back needed to sleep, they went off again for a while. The driver is not the only person in the car.
Here is what I had wrong.
I thought tiredness at the wheel was all in the body, so I fed the body something. Caffeine. A drink. A can.
But the part of me that was slipping away was my mind. It was going quiet. Coffee could wake my eyes up for a while. It couldn’t give my mind anything to do.
The story gave it a job.
A tired mind needs something to hold on to, not just something to drink.
I want to be careful here, because this is about driving, and driving tired is not a game.
A story never replaced sleep. Before any long drive, the first thing was always enough rest the night before. The stories helped a mind that was drifting. They could not save a body that was done.
And when nothing worked, when even the story couldn’t hold me, that was the end of the drive for me. I pulled in somewhere safe and slept. If you are ever that tired, pull over. No story beats sleep.
I still think about that point past the second hour, when the coffee gave up.
It was never really the coffee’s fault.
I had asked it to carry the whole road.
That’s all for this week.
See you next Saturday.
Cheers,
Farhan Terubos
One true story from my own week, every Saturday.
Written for people building something of their own around a full-time job.
