Against a void, the moon is an abstraction. I am choosing to imagine that it is suspended inside the starless sky like some kind of celestially dangling mobile, and I am just one of the billions of tiny humans who watch it swing with endless infatuation.

The Subaru, sleek and dark and inhumanly efficient, is speeding along a bridge; I do not look outside. I try to picture myself in the passenger seat of a vintage Mustang, a ‘75 probably, flipping my braids over my shoulders and laughing maniacally to some muttered joke—for now, though, I keep my hair tucked tightly behind my ears and my lips sealed, because I am trapped inside a piece of Japanese machinery and bolting cheerlessly toward material death. Along with the hush of the other vehicles passing us at breakneck speed, a fuzzy noise in the shape of cubic prisms and angled circles, blue and violet in technicolor, blares from the stereo. Then, another car like ours jets past, propelled by a burst of air - or maybe it is nothing but disguised Arabians floating on a magic carpet, unable to reveal their secrets to the white bread, gasoline price, gluten free Americans like me. I blink twice at their blurry expressions, just in case they can read my mind. 

The pilot of this Subaru is a man I scarcely know: I suspect we met in the garden, and that we had probably bumped noses trying to sniff the same tulip bloom, because they are so lovely this time of year and you’d have to be brain dead—clinically—not to see. 

If he ever introduced himself, I’ve already forgotten.

We are riding in ambient silence, I think, because neither of us wants to disturb the other’s assumed peace—in this stalemate, though, I am growing tired and dull, and I have never felt less interesting. My tongue is the taste of sandpaper; my eyelashes have shriveled up and died.

But because he is giving me, a wilted woman with a tepid glowering stare, a ride out of the city, I believe that he is kind. Or he pities me, but the end result is quite the same.

I feel the crowded atmosphere of the steel and stone has become too overwhelming these past years; the congestion in the air is only fueling my crippling nicotine addiction, among the others, because I can scarcely open a window without inviting in a barrage of smoke clouds. Sitting in the dim cabin of the car, if I squeeze my eyes I can taste the metallic tang of tap water. If I clench my fists I can hear the howling of the hounds with their heads chopped off in alleyways; if I cross my legs the sound of weeping infants crosses over the fuzz on the radio. I keep my eyes wide open, and my legs spread far.

I want to escape; does he want that, too? The horizon is a chemtrail, floating untethered—I cannot say with any certainty we’ll ever reach it, but we might. We might be yin and yang, then. We might be sun and moon, onyx skies and yellow dirt, we might be burning but I might be dying. In any case, this foreign hunk of metal is still speeding toward the sublime, and death does not captivate me at all. I am not a cynic nor a nihilist nor a socialite, and I am not a product of the city. Somewhere out there, farther than the asphalt falls, I think I see the hills, and they are bluer than the sky.