Your seat was a moving target. Or that’s how you chose to think about it. It was a moving target for someone above you looking down for as long as they were interested. What you really should be paying attention to, you addressed to nobody or somebody in particular, is the fact that the seat doesn’t really need to be here. It was just some thing holding you. Even to think of this as a seat was misleading, as though all you were doing was sitting. As though you weren’t shooting forward at 65 miles an hour. To whoever was watching, you anguished in your attempts to prove this the real magic, and you even dared think them a fool for their interest in the role of the seat. Yes, the seat was a crucial part of the even more necessary vehicle. It kept you in contact with what brought you from mother’s house to aunt’s Christmas party. But the act? The miracle? It was you, protagonist, ripping through space at a speed impossible for most living creatures. You existed in a car, but more importantly, you existed in motion. That was the central theme. This whole story was really about how you got to move.
You sit in a seat in a car on a highway on the way to a family dinner in your mind and bit by bit you pick apart the rest of the car, the remainders of what separate you from the outside. These things, they were distractions and thankfully your gift with visuals made separating yourself from them in turn an ease. How much of this do you really need? You take away the belt. You take away the leather seats. You remove the dashboard and all the ornaments you’d find yourself switching between. You take away the floor, the ceiling, the windows, the wheels, the oils, the tanks, the people. The car. And now you’re hovering midair, though you can only imagine what that must look like.
For reference, you look outside of your window and turn to the other cars. You find the people inside them, varied in their hunches but hunched nonetheless. You begin to take away their cars. You need to see what the rest looks like. You’ve got a point to prove and you disarm anybody you need to in order to do so. You’re left looking directly at people who remain unaware of how exposed you’ve left them, how ridiculous they look, zooming forward with expressions blissfully free of embarrassment (joy, boredom, sadness, many things but never embarrassment, never that awareness of you, of their own foolishness, of their own terribly awkward poses, of the realization of having been caught in their sham. Why, this isn’t very dignified at all!). You realize that this is how you look when you take a shit, and somehow, at the end of every day, you can manage to keep a straight face when you’re in your shit pose all the way home, or to work, but probably home because it’s dinner time, but you figure it’s not dinner time for everybody because somebody is rushing to a hospital somewhere, somebody is going to their second job to feed their two kids, alone. Someone’s missing their favorite shows, shows they set time to watch on the television as it airs because it’s about the ritual, really, not the show, the show they can watch anytime, online probably, they’ve heard it plenty, they know, but it’s not about that, the show, it’s about the ritual, just the act of being there and having somewhere to be. But instead they’re missing it. Someone has to. Everyone has to eat. And then everyone has to shit. You choose not to tell them about their shit poses, and it’s likely that nobody ever did or ever will. It was a dumb thought; one needn’t be in a car to derive those visuals. You note with disgust that, in addition to this newfound tendency of yours to draw pointless conclusions, you’ve become more vulgar – something to work on. It was progress enough to think this. You see someone laugh and you figure they’ve found something better to engage with – probably something with less shit in it.
You shift your focus back to them and then between them in search of your own better something. You look to what once comprised the backdrop to these people and their new and ideally/most likely unknown shames. These are larger ventures, more abstract, and potentially more meaningless. Better to look than to think. Not a mantra you should’ve forgotten so quickly, you think. Quiet now - it’s difficult enough to focus on the entire image without this noise. Yes, it’s difficult enough to focus on the entire image, you understand, so you latch on to the closest distillation of background. Whatever background is, you’ll let your eyes decide. Your eyes naturally settle for singularity or, perhaps, connectivity. They ache for stability amidst the 65 mph madness. They focus on tree, on house, on thing before it zooms out of your vision, gone forever until its mirror on the drive back reminds you of it. You respect these moments, nothing insignificant about passing. You look, and try to remember every detail for what it was, you seek the individuality in every tree as quickly as possible, you hope to honor your time with every object. You latch on to them for as long as you can, hanging on until the last possible moment and then you jump with all of your might right on to another tree, another house, another thing. Old friend, forgotten? You trust not. You have no choice but to do so. You must attend to the new beings in your life.
You do this for a while. Your head tells you your eyes hurt before they can, and it drives you to commit all the more fiercely to these exercises in letting go. But only for so long. As you keep your eyes on the tree, house, thing you can’t help but notice how the world around you stretches into threads of color, compressing and slowing for just a second, at the center of your vision, as though yearning for your attention one final time. Though still they move, as though resigned, as though painfully keen to the limitations of that attention – and yet still they try. Still they go through the motions. It’s the ritual again - there’s something important about the roles things play. As they reach the limits of your vision/the limits of you, they forgive you, or they don’t care, and they zoom past you again, thin as before and getting thinner still. The people, without their cars, are colors now too. Colors shouldn’t need to feel shame, you figure.
You close your eyes and let in a breath and sound follows. No longer competing with your trusted friend, sight, it washes back in with vigor, and you’ve no choice but to swim with it. It rattles your bones and brings you to your core. It fills you as surely if not more substantially than the very breath that let it in. You’re drowning in it again. And it always seems to be about drowning. Only now you’re eager to prevail. Occasionally you open your eyes again for a quick taste of the familiar. You describe the switch from sound to vision and sound as a whirl, the rush of blinding blood from a surfaced breath. You’re splashing around. You only now think to let these sensations carry you. If sound is water, elusive, invasive, and intangible as it may be, then you hope it’ll be warm, or remind you of warmth, the way a cold day brings more attention to the sun, the way you yearn and enjoy yearning, much like your passing trees and leftover homes. You can never enjoy the sun if you don’t know the cold. You wear your sleeves up during the winter to show the sun how much you miss it. It replies in kind. And you find yourself listening to the sounds around you again. You’re trying to. It won’t come as naturally to you as watching. There’s too much to choose from. You see, there’s the voice of your mother and the sound of the music and the clank of the car as it switches lanes. For a moment you let the bass from the radio massage your chest, proving to you once more that a source of pain can also bring great pleasure. You’re soothed for a while. Images rise up once more. You’re impossible. There’s a thumping pushing past the textures of the bass that reminds you of the cross, the cross your mother hung on the rearview that hung so low it would occasionally hit the dashboard. It was wrapped around the rearview so many times you wondered how these thumps could even be possible. You struggle to latch on.
Your mother says you’re awfully quiet today. And you agree. You chat, you joke. You listen to the way your own voice sounds and how it measures up to the bass from earlier. You somewhat enjoy feeling yourself speak. You think next up is your mother. You feel you’re at a performance. It’s easier to see this way. But you feel what is perhaps a great source of guilt, too, to imagine a conversation turned mechanical with the one person who deserves your entire human attention. Lucky for you, she drops the conversation for a moment to sing along with the radio. She’s let herself become reactionary to life and it’s pleasing to get to witness. She laughs a little softer these days. You only just noticed.
You find yourself back in the realm of thoughts. You think about the way you’re still sitting here, in your shit pose, next to other people in their shit poses and their shit lives. You think about the things you’ve missed. You think about the things you continue to miss. The sensations still manage to wrap themselves around you, even in these moments. You feel softened by the colors you let go, who are still here. You take in breaths. You feel you can almost hear yourself with every thought these days. You hear and welcome other voices from the outside, voices from the music your mom likes, music you hated when you were young but learned to like for the youth it brought your mother. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say it brings you similar youth now. You think back to your seats, and back to the cars, and this time on your travels back you skew a little and think about the very roads on which these all press. You wonder if it’s important to think about them, too. You figure not. There’s been enough to see and you’ve grown tired of watching as it is. You close your eyes and you’re swimming again, this time amidst stars that glow rhythmically in seas of red from passing streetlights. And are you happy? Well.
It was a dumb question.