A Girl Drives Home Alone at Night

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #180. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Interfacing in the millennium.

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Every Friday, in the dark corners of the early morning, I crawl from one edge of St. Louis to the other. My route takes me through the spaces where the city bleeds into something else, where the infinite fractals of highways split into infinite fractals of city roads split into infinite fractals of outlet streets. I pass dying creeks, rusting bridges, the checkerboard fences of industrial commons; I pass the blinding lights of gas stations, the unconvincing last-chance fast food spots, the windows of buildings dissatisfied with their emptiness. It seems to go on forever.

Without the bustle of the day, there’s an uncanny tone to these places. Absent their intended occupants, the distance between them seems morbidly indulgent, the result of some serious and uncomfortable mistake that we have become too apathetic to fix. The quiet is deadly; the sound of motor and music can’t break it, not really.

It’s peaceful, in the way of a horror movie before the tension break. The road slides into itself, the streetlights passing with dim regularity. Occasionally one flickers, as if bored. The rare approaching car is dreamlike; anyone could be the driver, separate from the rest of the world as we are this late at night, early in the morning, before polite society begins to breathe.

When the world is awake the space seems to make sense. Cars crowd the streets; pedestrians litter the sidewalks; roads go places, though sometimes they’re places where it’s hard to understand why people might want to go. Every half-empty strip mall has a populated past; every gray, ground-down parking lot has a hypothetical future occupant. The ugliness almost justifies it, function crowing its triumphant victory over form. Elegance seems like a particularly bourgeois concern when there are still lines at the drive-through, when everywhere you turn there are asphalt-scented, sun-baked signs of life.

Not so at night. At night the roads are just roads, returned to the Platonic ideal, a space in which there could be a car, in which the action of movement could be executed, in which travel might happen, to someone, somewhere, bringing them from one archetypal origin to one archetypal destination. At night the mercantile shell of storefronts are actually and earnestly hollow, lifeless but for blinking burglar alarms, a buzzing light or two. At night there is no greater gluttony than the endless expanse of the parking lot, this place dedicated half its life to nothing, greedy and empty and wanting. In the white glow of headlights there’s nothing but waste.

Again, I come back to peaceful. Peaceful carries with it the implied opposite; peaceful invites interruption. It’s an untrustworthy peace, fed by my own fear, my own suspicion. My aloneness feels unsuited to these spaces, as their aloneness feels to me – therefore, thus, the equation followed to its obvious conclusion, I am not alone.

So, my hand twitches on the steering wheel. I stare too closely at shadows. I look, almost eagerly, for the unfamiliar. The lights pass by. I wait for the silence to be broken.

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Maddi Chilton is an internet artifact from St. Louis, Missouri. Follow her on Twitter @allpalaces.