The only car

From up here, the car looks accidental. A small white speck on a long ribbon, surrounded on all sides by something older and more patient. The road bends once and disappears.

I think a lot about scale lately. About how small most things turn out to be when you back up far enough, the meeting that felt urgent on Monday, the argument that wouldn't let you sleep, the thing you were sure was the thing. From a hundred feet up, all of it would look like this car. Briefly there. Mostly trees.

The driver doesn't know they're being seen. They're inside their own version of the day, coffee in the cup holder, music probably, somewhere to be by noon. The forest doesn't know either. The forest is just busy being a forest, growing inch by inch in every direction, indifferent to the asphalt cutting through it.

There's a kind of comfort in being the small thing. In knowing the day will close around you the way the trees close around the road. In going through, and being passed through, and continuing on.