The Highway

You cannot escape the Highway.

It’s been with you your whole life. Forever on the brink of the horizon. Never far from your sight. Where would you go to escape its grasp?

When was it built? No one knows. Who built it? No one knows. Why did they build it? No one knows. For what purpose does it remain?

Nobody knows.

After all, how does one quantify the unknowable? Explain the unreachable? Identify the unseeable? One simply cannot.

It stands there in the distance, like a tower, like a beacon, its image forever piercing the mist. It encircles the city. Completely. Like a sentry standing watch, there is nowhere in the city where you cannot see it. Where it cannot see you. No place where you can hide from its shadow. It’s always there. Waiting for you. Watching.

Nobody’s seen what’s on top. No one’s ever been up there. It sits in the sky, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred, maybe even two hundred feet high. No one knows. It’s supports keep it just out of reach.

There are no on ramps, nor off ramps. No way to get on. No way to get off. It is a sentence, final and eternal unto itself.

And even if there was a way up there, it wouldn’t matter. For it matters not how far you drive, nor how long you travel into the night. You will never get there. It is always exactly the same distance from you as it has always been. Never closer, never farther. It’s always just there. Waiting for you. Beckoning to you. Watching you.

It’s been with you your whole life, as it has been for everyone else also. No matter where you go, no matter where you turn, it is always there with you, always just on the horizon. It will never leave. It will never go away. It will never crumble into dust, leaving an empty shell behind in its wake.

What is it, exactly? Nobody knows. But it doesn’t matter.

You cannot escape the Highway.