Moving In

Last night I was driving down the 10 around 1 in the morning towards home. I am new to this city and I was going about 65 miles an hour and this excited me tremendously because evidently, I had found one of the few times in the day where driving uninterrupted at this speed was possible.

Anyway, the highway was fairly empty and all of a sudden, I hit one of those points where the freeway curves under a tangle of loops and ramps overhead. Usually, in the daytime, these are packed with motionless vehicles and therefore make good places to quietly mourn the tragedy of urban planning that is Los Angeles. However, it was night, so the whole knot of empty asphalt simply looked like a criss cross of shadows, where the silhouettes of the roads carved imperfect shapes out of the night sky.

As I was passing under the network of off-ramps and connecting veins of highway, something came into view. Two ribbons of highway above me forked and continued until they met a ramp going elsewhere, that was surely beneath, but because it was dark, seemed to connect perpendicular to the fork, which outlined a rough triangle of the night. Framed within, strikingly, was half of the moon, deep and yellow and flecked with orange.

It was a moment where something crude and rough and created by men for utility with no pretense of aesthetics met something natural and familiar and not created by man. And the image that arose from the union was very beautiful, in the most unintended and unassuming of forms.

It wasn't much and it was only for a second, but I do know that it'd be nice to have more encounters like this.