Dust

Hour ten. I-70.

The beginning of the transition to numbness, the liminal moment of a road trip where you are too far to turn back and too close to stop for the day. You got up early, ate a filling breakfast, and have been stopping only to fill the tank. You aren't yet at the point of hallucinatory fatigue.

The drive is smooth and straight, and the landscape is a rolling gray-green, a red barn or silo every so often. The drive is an extended classical ambience, like the instrumentals in Moby's When It's Cold I'd Like to Die. Cars drift close behind, break slightly as they shift lanes, and very slowly drift ahead. If you weren't moving they would essentially be passing at one miles per hour.

A compact SUV passes in front of you at a distance. The driver's window lowers and a white cloud emerges and begins dissipating. In a few seconds, you drive through the transparent veil of dust. Thousands or tens of thousands of particles enter the front grill of your car, a large percentage immediately wiping out on the metal innards. The remainder enter the air intake for the interior fan and bounce through the plastic tubes until they emerge from an interior vent. Another large amount wipe out on the interior, and your clothes, and your skin. The remainder wind up in your nose, bouncing through the fleshy tubes, into the blood stream to the brain.

The back of your head prickles with gooseflesh; your hearing sounds like listening through cotton; your pupils pulse. You become aware of the various materials of the car stretching and sighing. Clouds appear to form and burst. The sunlight trickles through them causing shadow waves, like on the bottom of a riverbed. Your car passes into an extended shadow wave, the shade immediately perceptible to all senses. You shiver.

You aren't in a hurry, but you are on the run. The objective is to stay one step ahead. Sometimes you feel like a giant fleeing a human; the slowness of a single step is all that's needed to stay out of reach. The time between steps can seem long and become comfortable until the pursuer is spotted at a distance. Death approaches patiently, unperturbed. You can feel the proximity and know the time has come to move again. Time to take the next step.