Auto Motive

You zone back in again, momentarily disoriented. It’s night-time, you’re in a car on a motorway. The dashboard glows red and white against its black background. Your headlights highlight the salt-stained carriageway. The tail lights of the cars ahead dance in front of you like bloodied fireflies.
You’re in the fast lane, which is good, because you like speed. You feel the all-pervasive vibration of the car as a tonal dissonance caressing your bones. The speedometer needle rears its head, as if to plunge into your skin for a fatal fuel injection.
You like the motorway, especially after dark. The road spreads before you, infinite possibility swallowed by the blackness. The warm glow of the city lurks like a nuclear aftermath in the distance. Next stop, oblivion.
You like the motorway because you can pretend that you’re going somewhere without facing the betrayal of arrival. You’re in suspended animation between the past and the future. It’s nowhere, fast.
You like the motorway because it doesn’t care who you are, what you’ve been, where you want to be. Spendid in your isolation, you are the universe and the universe is you and everything that was ever knowable is with you in this cabin.
Your mind wanders aimlessly before settling on an Iggy Pop song. La la, la la, la la la la. Then your eyes drop to the steering wheel in front of you and you experience the sudden, dull realisation that the hands upon it are your own.