In your imagination, it’s always night.
The road unfolds underneath you. The secret dark interior space of the car. Driving is a warm hypnosis: no music, you just listen to the wheels turn. You could do this forever.
You like how the thin electric lights of your dashboard glow in the dark like magic fire.
There is the unspoken possibility of not stopping. The road doesn’t end. You could pile miles on top of miles and just keep going. The thread attaching you to your point of origin would grow thinner, become a strand of angel’s hair looped far over the horizon. It would cling to the trees, and people would walk through it like an invisible film of cobweb that sticks to their clothes. Just because you can’t feel it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.
You could live cheaply. All you’d need is fuel and a little food. Sleep at roadside places, or in your car in empty lots. In your dreams the money just appears from somewhere, enough just to keep the long journey going. It’s an irrelevant detail to the fantasy. Your clothes are worn, but clean. You imagine pulling your collar up against the driving rain as you walk back to the car with a plastic cup of gas-station coffee.
Gas stations at night. Glowing oases of light. Each one a marker of the journey. One thousand. One thousand and one.
One thousand and two.
You would drive only at night (it’s always night). You think about how your world would narrow to just the confines of this car. You would map out every inch of the space inside the vehicle even as you mapped out vast territories over the landscape. You would come to know intimately each smudge and fleck on the glass windshield, each bump on the steering wheel. A strand of hair in the passenger footwell carpet. Stasis would reign – in your imagination, nothing changes inside the car, ever.
Is there a better sound in all of the kingdom than that of windshield wipers at 3am? Swish, thunk. And the wheels keep turning. Swish, thunk. Who here among us has not yet been saved?
I’ve been saved, you think.
— BLCKHLCPTR is a feeling-world. It’s our world, but it’s always night. It’s the static between the stations as you drive cross-country, and the voices you hear in it. It’s the sea beneath the sea, and the ships that sail there.