This rusty car creaking along the highway.

So the other night a motorcyclist draws up from behind. His single, steady light does so gradually while I'm driving in the car towards home after wandering lonely inside the drowning noise of rubber on highway, and of wind sneaking through shuttling crevices. The blank noise of a car late at night has been written about, and has been sung about. All kinds of lines that welcome the way it smothers the incessant haunting of one's inability for understanding, or worse actually, the unnegotiable despair of having understanding. These combined with something lit in hand and something liquid under the seat, it's a convention.

The trouble, the truth, is that when you drive long enough, the dull pulse of fear that lay in those thoughts becomes amplified. You flail about in wonder at how a thing--something shared and held, something communed--can be made to vaporize, and how it does in a joyful white flash so that what you still have within you is as if a careful delusion. After a while all that a person sees is the cycling of their mind around images on fire, about an impossible confusion. But then a motorcyclist drew up, and once it was close it turned off its headlight. Now all that could be seen of it was a floating nickel in my tail lights, too near my car as it sailed along behind me. When that happens the first fear, the one that loudens in every crawling day, is suddenly flattened by the anxiety of whether you should speed up or slow down, and how quickly you should make either of those transitions. But then a few minutes later, because somehow this is how it is, they weave into each other. And mortality and fear become the same thing, these two vehicles in the dark.