There’s a point in every road movie where the landscape stops being the point.
You’ve gone far enough that novelty wears thin, but not far enough to feel like you’re heading home. The character is tired. The music is still loud, but it’s doing more work now holding things together rather than celebrating them.
That’s where I am.
Three weeks into this trip, I’ve reached the lowest point geographically in the U.S., and now I turn east and north Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin. The road stretches endlessly again, but this time it feels different. Weary, not empty. Full, but heavy.
The music is still blasting. It has to be.
And between songs, I’m trying to learn Spanish for the next chapter of this sabbatical future conversations, future versions of myself. It feels hopeful in theory. In practice, my brain is tired.
I think of No Country for Old Men, when Sheriff Bell says,
“You can’t stop what’s coming. “
My depletion feels like that. Not a single moment, but a slow, unavoidable arrival.
Somewhere along this stretch, I see a magician perform.
It’s unexpected. Unplanned. One of those moments you stumble into when you’re not looking for meaning anymore. After the show, he welcomes me as a fellow magician. Not politely. Not casually. As an equal.
That shouldn’t matter as much as it does…. but it does.
One of his tricks sparks something in me. A simple structure. A shared moment. And suddenly, I see it clearly: my “Message” card game not as an idea, but as an experience. Something meant for gatherings. For connection. For wonder. I pull the thread, mentally building it as the road hums beneath me.
I’ve always loved magic. Not the flashiness. The wonder. The impossibility. The brief suspension of certainty where anything feels possible again. Magic asks you to believe not forever, just for a moment.
But I never gave myself time to practice it properly. Last Christmas, at my magic club’s party, I performed for the first time. I bombed. Completely. The tricks didn’t land. My hands weren’t confident. My timing was off. I remember standing there, smiling through it, knowing exactly why it was happening.
I was exhausted. Overworked. Running on fumes.
Magic, like joy, doesn’t survive neglect.
I think of The Prestige.
“Now you’re looking for the secret but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking.”
I wasn’t really looking back then. I was surviving. Performing productivity. Convincing myself that once things slowed down, I’d return to what I loved.
Things never slowed down. As the miles pass, I arrive at a town called “Trinidad” and older memories start surfacing the kind exhaustion loosens its grip on.
Growing up in Trinidad as an Asian kid, I learned early what it felt like to be different. To be singled out. Kids pulled their eyes back, called me “chinky eyes”, mimicked fake Chinese sounds even though I didn’t speak the language. I learned how to laugh it off before it could hurt too much. Learned how to shrink certain parts of myself to move through the world more easily.
I think now about how often that skill followed me into adulthood.
How being resilient became being quiet.
How being strong became being available.
How being capable became being consumed.
There’s a line in Rocky Balboa that hits differently now:
“It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. “
But no one tells you what happens when you keep moving forward for too long without stopping.
The road doesn’t give me answers. It gives me space. Space to see how wonder slipped away not dramatically, but gradually. How magic became something I admired instead of practiced. How joy became conditional on rest I never took.
Still, something is shifting.
I’m tired but I’m remembering who I was before survival became my personality. Before exhaustion dulled curiosity. Before I forgot that impossibility is something you can practice.
If this were a movie, this would be the long middle. The stretch critics say feels slow on first watch, but later turns out to be the point. The part where the character starts telling the truth…. to the audience, and to themselves.
I keep driving. I keep listening. I keep practicing Spanish words I can’t quite pronounce yet.
And somewhere between states, I let myself believe this: Wonder isn’t gone. It’s just been waiting for me to stop rushing past it.