Mood Piece February 6 2018

It was another one of those little towns you ran into on your way between one place and another. Main street was just a spot along the highway where everyone had agreed to slow down for a bit, a few small stores and maybe a fast food joint rolled past his windows, all the houses had lawns halfway between life and death enclosed by waist-high chain-link fences. Always prefab houses too, he thought. These sorts of places never seemed to have been around long enough for anything else to have been here. Instead every one of them was made of the same frayed vinyl siding and pre-cut tile roofs. Like the town was laid down just like the highway was, and with the same level of attention given after it was done.

They were unsettling somehow, those houses. Like they were taking up too much space. Maybe it was because even amongst the straight streets and the mass-produced facades they always seemed to be placed haphazardly somehow. Each little plot somehow splayed against its backdrop; an uneasy joining of raw industrial efficiency and unapologetic apathy. Who built these places anyway? You never saw one being constructed, no new homes going up or fresh asphalt being set. It was like they grew up all at once, already somehow old and dying, called from the collective unconscious of bored motorists suddenly thrust out into the wide swaths of country opened up by cheap oil and a post-war boom. Perhaps these were the detritus of a nations id given form by a deeper need to fill any void before it could see us too clearly.

You never really stopped in places like this, he mused, only ever passed through unless it was to get gas or maybe a soda before setting off again. And even then it was no more than a quick exchange of pleasantries with an attendant and then it was like you were never there. Like the place was never there. It all carried the cloying sense of unreality; he was a ghost everyone in the house agreed to never directly acknowledge but to accommodate none the less.

Towns like these only existed in the middle of the country, spread illogically across that great yawning maw of space between the big beacons of humanity. They were the spaces in between, living in the crease between the real world and the wholly unbelievable. He could almost believe that if he took a turn wrong in a place like this he'd find himself suddenly driving lonely under an alien sky, with no hope of ever getting back. Each town was like a border guard, a never-was and a quasi-where between the place he understood and whatever lay behind that curtain.

He glanced down at his dash. No need to stop for gas in this town he thought. As he neared the edge of the town he turned the radio up a little to help drown out the silence. It would feel good to get back up to highway speed. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, and maybe he didn’t really want to, but some deep part of his brain knew there was safety in speed.