What Lies Beyond the Line

 

As I stared down towards the Jeep’s floorboard, sick from the smell of traffic on the freeway, weak from the strain of the city, I try to distract myself from discomforts by noticing the line dividing the safety of the car’s interior and the hazards beyond the door on the racing pavement. My eyes following that line, I perceive the world beyond the white lines changing. We have reached new lands on our drive.
Northwest of Los Angeles where the Pacific Coast Highway twists along, flirting with the water, is a place where lines come to divide the land. Hemispheres of differences lie on either side of that tortuous path. As you drive north, the screams of the life of the city can still be heard; pollution still mars the Eastern sky. Your chest pains in suffocation of smog and stress still. Signs, all sorts of boasting billboards for the LA litter your rear-view mirror. You have not left the city yet.
But alight your eyes upon what lies to the west: nothing. Sky separates from water at an incalculable place since both showcase such similar shades of sparkling azure. Seeing the sea is like seeing the bright sun after being so long in darkness; you cannot look directly at the sparkles of this new sight. Silence aligns the coast, screams of car alarms and radio report chatter and the constant dim caused by cell phone usage have no place here. Busy the beach is, but the people here do not shout sounds of stress and pressure, but of pleasure. The crowds are insignificant, seeming small in comparison to the untold space occupied by the ocean.
Halving the world happens right here, right on this highway. Costly cars cruise along this road carrying precious cargo, perhaps celebrities on their way into the city. Do those drivers coming the opposite direction look in longing in their rear-view mirrors, hanging on to the last glimpses of the Pacific? How do they feel seeing what they are driving towards? But we stop looking behind in our mirror on this day, for sunny finery frames the front window, consuming our attentions. For this brief day, we leave behind that smoggy sky which hangs over our city. As we advance on the road, our ears fall deaf, filled with this new silence and our eyes squint, taking adjustments to this new view. I need no longer to stare between the floorboards.

 

 

Reviews

[Pj]

You show great insight...the things we try and leave behind, still follows us and those seeing such pollution of society are the ones also contributing to the environmental degradation. I found it quite intriguing because of the irony..(well that's what I saw lol)

Good job :D