Art Gallery

I got in my car after work today so that I could get a coffee and drive around.

I don’t know if the appeal of driving around makes sense unless you are likewise a person who relates to the desire to get in a car and cruise around purposelessly for an undefined stretch of time (the appeal of coffee should be obvious: it is delicious). I don’t know if it’s the physical containment inside the vehicle that I enjoy–it being an actual refuge of sorts, a sort of mobile liminal space–or the way that it enables actual GOING (even though it’s a false going, always resolving, always ending). I think any of these would be reason enough for me to keep this ritual.

But earlier, as I was driving north on College and thinking about today’s prompt and the notion of other people’s stories, I realized that part of my longing to drive around is not only so that I might press pause on myself or supplant the frenetic pace of my brain with the interrupted pace of the city road, but it is also because I want to absorb something of what I know I’ll see: I want to pull into my mind for a time the people making the Indianapolis that I love to drive through. I want to be that–the things I’m seeing–and I can while I fill up my eyes and crowd out my own objects and textures with theirs.

My driving art gallery tour. On its rainy days, Indianapolis becomes a Monet through the speckled, blurry windshield.

_{Today’s prompt: Go people watching (from a safe distance!) and write an homage to who you see or a person you observe. If you prefer not to head out of your home, focus your observations/homage on someone within your home.}