There’s something attractive about people who love things.
The thing itself doesn’t really matter. It could be an overanalysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a playlist that makes no sense to anyone but them, or a fifteen-minute explanation of why a scene in Coraline changed their life. What matters is the intensity of it.
And I think what that intensity really comes down to is awe. This awe lingers in where we stop in the middle of speaking because the sky turned a certain color or because someone laughed in a way we want to remember forever rather than existing in grand moments such as mountaintops or weddings.
Unfortunately, it feels like that kind of awe is disappearing. While it may sound dramatic, we live in a world that wants everything to be efficient and optimized. Even wonder has become something to consume faster. We ask artificial intelligence to make art for us, to write for us, to think for us, because heaven forbid we sit long enough with our own thoughts to create something imperfect.
And yet, the same people who call the arts and humanities impractical cry at movies, read poetry at funerals, and stare at paintings as if they hold deeper meaning just because someone decided to capture that snapshot of time. We pretend beauty is optional until grief strips us down to the things that actually matter. Then suddenly someone’s song is enough to make us cry in the car.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are still people who still go outside to watch fireflies, who still collect pressed flowers within pages of books, who still know the smell of summer petrichor, who still look out train windows like they’re escaping to somewhere they feel small because their thoughts are too big for them. Those people are still here, and that is where the places start to matter.
The car at night is the one that feels almost expected and archetypal, like something copied from every coming-of-age movie that ever existed. The streetlights slide across the windshield like slow film edits above the blueish glow of the dashboard, and the engine idles. It’s always around eleven, sometimes later, when the world has that muted 1980s synth quality to it, like Drive or The Breakfast Club if it took place after midnight instead of detention. We sit there with the sunroof open in a friend’s driveway with the windows slightly fogged and phones connected to the speakers. Someone puts on a playlist that jumps from Lana Del Rey to Radiohead to some song that everyone forgot they still knew. And suddenly everyone is screaming lyrics that should not be screamed with full confidence.
We’re not good singers. That’s the point.
Outside, the world is indifferent in the way it always is at night. Gas stations, empty intersections, and the occasional car pass like background characters in a movie that is not about them. Inside, it feels like we are the only people left in the timeline.
There are sidewalks after rain too. The pavement shines under streetlights, reflecting everything just slightly wrong, doubling and softening the world. Shoes slip against concrete, but no one is really in a hurry to get anywhere. The air smells like wet leaves and asphalt and something that makes us think of being 10-years-old again.
There are rooftop balconies. From up there, everything shrinks and cars become moving lights. People become stories we can’t hear, and the city stops being something we are inside of and instead something we are briefly observing.
With AP season over, junior year is ending, and everything happening around the world does frighten me on a daily basis, but what we worry about the most reveals where we trust God the least at the end of the day. Yesterday is over, tomorrow is still far away, and today is still unknown, so why not seek—or at least cling onto—the awe we deserve?
Maybe one day we’ll understand, but for now, it’s enough to sit in the car with the windows fogging, sing with friends off-key, and feel the devastating uncertainty of being alive while the world is turning.
