Ideas flit in the open window, and then out again, fast as the dashes on the road fly by, half-crystalized, blown again to dust.
There’s something about the westerly light and a westerly path in the early evening in October.
The same road driven the opposite way an hour later is a different journey. The shadow of the earth starts to paint the eastern sky blue and pink, and the traveler is a brave one has he pushes the gas pedal on towards an infinite night. The stars will rise soon, and the street signs might as well say “Mars: 266 years.”
But the way home in the golden October five thirty is different due west.
Familiar songs play on the radio, the last buzz of coffee lighting up my brain. They’re pre-fall, and so whiny. Are the Black Keys a harbinger of the fall of Rome? Did they capture the spirit of a generation, yawning in boredom and pretend problems until the unfathomable night closed in? Should we be surprised? Should we….
The thought balances like a spider on the edge of the tempered glass window, until the wind whisks it back into the vague world of rolling countryside, the grass backlit by those westerly rays.
The sun sinks, refusing to be captured by any word, melting through any net of moral and “therefore” points I’d conjure up at five thirty, driving west.
As it should be.
And the road rolls on.