📞 Drive Away
A 2 AM phone call and the line you’re not sure where to draw.
Inspired by the Song “Drive Away” — The Brummies & Kacey Musgraves — Recommended that you listen to it in the background
📖 Behind the Story
When I wrote this, I didn’t know yet whether it was a love story or a warning.
I wrote it on purpose so it could be both.
That’s the most honest thing I know how to say about this particular kind of love. The kind that asks you to come pick it up at 2 AM. The kind whose presence makes any plan feel right. The kind you keep keys in hand for.
Some of you will read this and think: that’s devotion. That’s what showing up actually looks like.
Some of you will read this and think: I’ve been here. That’s how it starts.
You wouldn’t be wrong. Either of you.
I think most of us have driven half an hour at 2 AM for someone we loved and probably shouldn’t have. Felt the exhaustion just disappear. Told ourselves the stars looked beautiful when really we were just looking at them, and they were already somewhere else entirely.
When I heard “Drive Away” by The Brummies and Kacey Musgraves, I saw the whole thing before I wrote a single word. The phone was glowing in the dark. Keys already in hand. The road opens up ahead of her. The song never once tells you what to feel about it, and I didn’t want to either.
On the Visual Process
I decided early on that we’d never really see him.
In the film strip panels, he shows up in profile, half-framed, like a photo that didn’t quite come out. And when they’re finally in the car together, he’s there — blurred, out of focus in that specific way where you’re looking right at them and still can’t quite make them out.
The zine goes back and forth between two things: the illustrated panels, which are hers, and the film strip panels, which are kind of... his.
His voice. The road. The whiskey glass. The keys.
That split became a motif, a way to give each of them a visual language without ever putting them on equal footing.
She gets to be fully drawn. He becomes a recurring image.
The warm glow from the first panel, her phone lighting her face in the dark, doesn’t come back. After that, it’s cooler. Streetlight, headlights, open road. The further she drives, the darker it gets.
And the keys close the story the same way they open it. She already had them in her hand. Before she said yes, before she even asked where he was.
That’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it?
The story doesn’t change. Only the reader does.
And maybe that’s what this kind of love does, too. It stays exactly the same, 2 AM after 2 AM, phone call after phone call.
It’s the person behind the wheel who has to decide what to make of that.
✦
💭 A Question for You
Have you ever picked someone up, literally or figuratively, and only later realized how much it cost you?