A wolf in sheep's clothing, the car looked innocuous enough on the outside. Round and white like an ewe due for sheering. Inside, though, it felt all teeth and threats of violence.
Having to drive on the left side of the road was fine, long as I was driving a simple, straight line. I could feel the oddness, certainly, but it took little cognitive effort to maintain. It was when turning or merging or making any other kind of major positional adjustment where the mental effort would instantly ramp up like a jet turbine preparing for emergency take off. The calculus to catch habitual actions and reverse them, double check I was reversing and not flipping, then make sure I wasn't reversing an already reversed perspective and therefore dooming us all to fiery death was exhausting.
"Right far, left close," I would chant aloud at every single turn, a ward against mangling steel and flesh. By the second day my co-pilot was chanting along with me.
Driving from the right side of the car was the most brutal bit. I hadn't realized how much a car's position in space had become a ghostly extension of my own body. How much instinct had taken over my sense of where I, as car, was in relation to the road and things around me. Switching sides of the car was like losing a limb and replacing it with a prosthetic. All my instincts revolved around the space a phantom car would exist in, as I tried to reorient with this new object bearing only a surface resemblance to what decades of experience had grafted into my memory.
