The Intersection
6th April2025

This is a beautiful intersection. It is quiet just now …dark …and wet, the lights reflect and shine off the gravel, yellows, reds…

There is a liquor shop just there, a part of the hotel. I used to drink there when I was a kid, underage.

There are trees off to the side, on another corner golden arches …and a strange silence to it all. Not quiet, but just the road noise coming and going, not rhythmic, not ordered, nor together in any way, …intermittent.

It has a feeling of On The Road about it this intersection. Jack and Sal would have felt at home here I think.

It is a product of man's successes, of his ingenuity and of technology …and of manufacturing. But it is has some sadness, and baseness about it as well, a product also of ours …but of our failures. Dregs are here, flotsam and jetsam thrown aside from car tyres and the uncaring school kids that inhabit it during the day.

And it is still beautiful for all that. Cool, dark, not flashy, or important, thinking it is something that it is not …it is real.

It would be an acceptable place to die this intersection, I think.

I would feel the cold gravel under my back, the wet from the rain that fell earlier slowly seeping into my clothes. A paramedic, or passerby, or someone from a stopped car maybe would lean over my face …and look at me.

And I would hear the wet gravel sounds around, sounding different now on the road than they did when I was in my van. Quieter than usual, or perhaps that is because it is getting late, although not too late, not late enough that there are no other cars.

…and not late enough that there is no truck coming down the hill opposite, doing a decent enough speed, that all it would take …is a turn of the wheel …and an inching forward.

The sound of the indicator would continue, outlasting the sounds of breaking glass and crushing metal. And the dash would fracture, and bend and twist in such a way that the little yellow blinker, that is still blinking, would face a new direction, entirely.

And maybe that would be what I watch in those last moments.

That little yellow blinking light. And maybe it would quietly …and very very calmly …fade away?

City.