The Long Road Home

There is something deeply poetic about the open road at night; a silence in the air,  an emptiness ahead and behind and all around that envelopes and secludes the inspired mind.  The air is gooey with dissolved adjectives, humid with tiny crystalline droplets of inspiration that bead on the chilly windows and drip down their foggy panes.  Perfect, pellucid phrases, condensed prose.  The darkness appears behind them, the midnight highway empty of traffic, the sable nightscape free of headlights, save for mine, and I go speeding on, speeding on in silence, and in bliss. 

I am translucent, transcendent, the darkness passes through me like light through a prism and as it follows the gentle curve of the highway through the hills it is refracted and projected on my mind.  My eyes follow the road, follow it’s soft, tortuous path between the sleeping monoliths on either side, follow the comfortable infinity of its outlines, stretching forever into the darkness, and forever into my eyes.  Slowly, easily the steering wheel flows back and forth, keeps me centered, keeps me alive.  The city glows behind the hills, it’s lights a careful ward against submission to the night, each tired streetlamp, each buzzing neon contortion burning alone, untended and surrounded by the dominion of darkness, of night, of sleep.

The days have grown shorter, the twilight longer, the grey dawn bleeding softly into the golden afternoon, shot through with long shadows that stretch into the dusk.  The days, perhaps, have grown shorter.  Here in the midnight, however, winter’s grip grows weak.  Nature casts her spell of sleep, of dim half-consciousness on the soul and I am alone behind the wheel, speeding on, my headlights before, the darkness behind.  The feeling of January, of gray skies and sleepy days and empty trees and listlessness is gone in the perfect black, in the power of midnight.

The beacon in the distance, the messenger in the darkness blinks from green to gold to red, suspended in the air above the road that no longer pushes into infinity, that crouches and waits patiently for release.  I am conscious, suddenly, of the noise I am making, of the putter putter of the engine and the buzz of the headlights and the squeak of the steering wheel, and I turn off the car.  No one laughs at me.  No one honks his horn.  No one screams obscenities when the light turns green and sets loose the roadway.  I sit in silence, in quiet freedom, and the highway speeds away and I am left, alone with…what?  With a few hours ‘til daylight, and a long trip home, I guess.  I wouldn’t trade it for the world.