Sunday Night

We drove home.

It snowed the day before and got bitterly cold that day, so what was once a fresh matte now appeared hard and plastic. I stared out the passenger side window for 22 minutes, appalled at the fake snow and the time of day.

Sunday nights are difficult for people who were never meant to work desk jobs but have to because no one pays waitresses more than $3 an hour. And tips on lunch shifts don't make up the difference after college.

There are few cars on the road late on Sunday nights. The isolation and sense of impending doom can be overwhelming. The fake snow didn't help.

Street lights bled onto frozen intersections as dark building after dark building shuffled past my window, hoping I wouldn't see. And I didn't really see, until one seemed to cave in on itself a little.

The next one was fine.

The one after that quivered a bit as we drove past and probably collapsed as soon as it was out of sight.

The next one was fake. I don't know how I always thought it was real, but even glancing at it briefly in that moment, it screamed of everything temporal. Everything fleeting. It confessed it had lied to me for years and was really nothing more than a prop. What I once believed to be a piece of reality, one that would stand longer than myself, laughed at me for being so foolish. I was betrayed.

I couldn't see them, but I knew they were toppling. I knew we were leaving a wake of rubbish behind us because each one that fell left me feeling more exposed. I knew when a fresh batch of debris finally settled because I felt more eternal, and my heart in light of eternity is tiny. Each one reduced to rubble left me more alone with the Beginning and the End, and I groped to find a place somewhere in the middle.

One by one I'm sure they crumbled just as soon as I couldn't see them anymore.