(no subject)
The Ride Home
The warm night air greets our faces as we step out onto my uncle’s driveway, about to voyage home. This has always been my favorite part of the night, the part where we glide sleepily back into the faceless warm sea of lights, orange and white orbs disembodied and levitating. While we are stopped, waiting to turn left onto the freeway, I catch an early glimpse of the city before we flow through. We gain momentum to the one point our universe is centered around; home. Conversation from the front and right drifts past my ears like smoke, accompanied by songs that struggle in vain to sound like truth. No matter though, everything has its own truth to it. Out the window, I can see the lighted, half-buried-beehive shaped mansion among its forest of cactus. We’re swinging around a corner beside it as if a rope runs from the mansion to our car, avoiding the black jungle trees and white stars between. I see the red lights of the radio towers, and memories of my precocious first encounter with infinity come flooding back. I thought that, instead of coming up from the mountain, they were lights at the ends of unimaginably long strings, and I’d always end up scaring myself trying to think of where they could possibly be tied. Our family has been making this trip out to Phoenix and back literally as long as I can remember. The freeway feels as intimate now as a freeway can. Creeping up on Tempe, I see a parking garage so lit up that it looks like an ocean liner on the water; a little farther on, the mountain on which somebody always makes a tremendous Christmas tree out of lights every year. I see the factory and remember that I wanted to destroy it when I was small because it pollutes. And finally, the big blue bank building comes into view. I’d talk to it on the way to school every day when I still believed it was talking back. It was named Tall Building, and to a five year old boy, it was the best friend anyone could hope for. Now, simply a giant mirrored building out of place among the low, wide structures of the west coast, it has stopped speaking. It still does stand as a signal that home is near, though, and soon, we’re dreamily slipping back into the neighborhood.
The warm night air greets our faces as we step out onto my uncle’s driveway, about to voyage home. This has always been my favorite part of the night, the part where we glide sleepily back into the faceless warm sea of lights, orange and white orbs disembodied and levitating. While we are stopped, waiting to turn left onto the freeway, I catch an early glimpse of the city before we flow through. We gain momentum to the one point our universe is centered around; home. Conversation from the front and right drifts past my ears like smoke, accompanied by songs that struggle in vain to sound like truth. No matter though, everything has its own truth to it. Out the window, I can see the lighted, half-buried-beehive shaped mansion among its forest of cactus. We’re swinging around a corner beside it as if a rope runs from the mansion to our car, avoiding the black jungle trees and white stars between. I see the red lights of the radio towers, and memories of my precocious first encounter with infinity come flooding back. I thought that, instead of coming up from the mountain, they were lights at the ends of unimaginably long strings, and I’d always end up scaring myself trying to think of where they could possibly be tied. Our family has been making this trip out to Phoenix and back literally as long as I can remember. The freeway feels as intimate now as a freeway can. Creeping up on Tempe, I see a parking garage so lit up that it looks like an ocean liner on the water; a little farther on, the mountain on which somebody always makes a tremendous Christmas tree out of lights every year. I see the factory and remember that I wanted to destroy it when I was small because it pollutes. And finally, the big blue bank building comes into view. I’d talk to it on the way to school every day when I still believed it was talking back. It was named Tall Building, and to a five year old boy, it was the best friend anyone could hope for. Now, simply a giant mirrored building out of place among the low, wide structures of the west coast, it has stopped speaking. It still does stand as a signal that home is near, though, and soon, we’re dreamily slipping back into the neighborhood.