There's always new art on the overpass

We drove for like ten minutes in silence, both of us expectant for something to happen that would break one or both of our resolves. Our arguments these days were like Morse code with spotlights in a dead dark sea, detached and full of pregnant pauses that did most of the meaning for us. What I’m saying is the words were basically a terse afterthought when neither of us had much desire to mount a rescue.

She said you always go too far with a metaphor, like figures of speech actually are worth saying. I said they’re not, and I said it as a question, and she said good God you really think imagery is the same as honesty don’t you. I told her she could pick up her own dry cleaning in the morning but didn’t much mean it. She looked out her window and I checked my mirrors.

She leaned back and put her feet on the dash, which I know she knew it made me nervous but maybe she just forgot. There’s a part on the freeway where you just suddenly notice you’re downtown, almost like it’s a magic trick of city planning, mirrors everywhere to hide the fifty story buildings until the moment you pass the signs for the zoo and the aquarium and that one lawyer’s billboard, the one who wears the golf cap and hablas espanol. Even though the buildings rose up out of meanness and fulfilled the promise of decades, even though this place once made us feel so small but still alive, even though there were a million things worth noticing in every instant and every foot of pavement, we didn’t.