Traffic is bad. Well, was bad. Traffic implies movement in at least one direction. There's something stalling in considering the swell of industry here so many years ago that managed to turn the only dirt road into town a throbbing artery of steel and ambition. It didn't take long for that one road to become four. The town took less than a year to grow from a hopeful opportunity at the end of a long dusty line into a burgeoning nexus of unchecked proliferation. And it grew. And grew. And grew. Eventually as tall as it was wide. In fact where its landbound borders were halted only by the surrounding canyons and mountains in every eventual direction, the sky presented no such halting limit. To be sure, the very idea of entropy seemed as lofty as each new skyscraper gradually pricking its needle into the impossible blue above. This was real progress. There was as much breath and life and blood coursing through this city as any body organic. An endless hive of ignitious activity and dividing cells spawning bigger and brighter explorations of recombinant youth.
There was little attention to those historically stifling concerns of process, and security, and the paying of the piper when the piper came to town. A select few of us saw it a little earlier than the rest, but still too late for all the good it did us only to watch helplessly as our rapidly expanding universe grew predictably into a tumour, over which most of us became too heartbroken to stay and watch drain away into history again.
But stay some of us did. We watched as she continued to feed on the arrogant dream chasers that poured into town, oblivious to the signs of decay already sweeping out from its wounded heart like a ruinous coagulation of too much too soon. We watched as she fed, but was too tired to chew and too hungry to spit them out. It became exhausting, watching that horrible but elegantly designed extinction of dreams on such a massive scale. And before we knew it, before we could warn the others, it took us too. Our years of youth and promise swept away into the same dust and rock that had birthed us.
And then he came. Just as alone and oblivious and wide-eyed as all the rest. I can say confidently that there was not a single thing different about him than we had seen roll through here a thousand times before all of these last twenty-odd years. Not a single thing. Except for what he had brought with him.
And I don't think even he knew it at the time.
