Night lights; or, on sonder

It was well past midnight and I was driving (viz. I was sitting shotgun) to a party in the monotonous grids of suburbia. Nothing was visible but the retroflective coatings of red octagons and yellow triangles, the rest of those quiet roads subsumed by the night. But as the music of the car gave way to the muffled bass reverberating from our destination, rows of parked cars began lining up the sides of the street. And it was terribly endearing to see their dimmed headlights glimmering under our beams, glassy prisms poking out of a sea of darkness. I was more than a little tipsy, so it had me sentimental, reminding me of some sort of sonder, a mishmash of memories from years ago… and so I closed my eyes, transported somewhere in the past and nowhere in particular.

I’m in the backseat, coming back from a concert or a supermarket or a friend’s house. I lean my head against the car window, scarcely awake, eyes fluttering, nothing but darkness outside with occasional pinpricks of light—vehicles in the opposite lane, neon store signs, stoplights—stretched into astigmatic starbursts. I play a game. Watching the opposite lane, I wait until I see two white lights with another close behind. I guess if the light behind is the singular headlight of a motorcycle or if it’s of a car whose right light is obscured by the car in front. Back then, at least, I would always guess that it were a motorcycle. I think that sort of a conviction holds high correlation with the spark in one’s eyes, you know?* I was usually wrong, but I played this game precisely because (besides being a good way to count sheep) occasionally I would be correct.

I grew up outside Boston, and biker gangs were a common sight on the I-95. Even at that age, absolutely enamoured by the otherworldly fantasies of Ghibli movies and space operas, I knew it was unlikely the riders I saw were particularly interesting. They were likely old white men, balding, clinging onto lives they no longer lived. But it was dark, and I couldn’t tell for sure; for all I knew, they could be the drug-dealing Hells Angels portrayed in movies. And if the light’s partner became visible as we got closer—i.e. if it were a car—I could still impose a variety of fun interpretations: perhaps it was the beginning of a funeral procession or a presidential motorcade, or maybe a husband speeding to the hospital as his wife undergoes labor in the back. At night, the lives behind those lights could be anything.

And maybe they were mundane—there’s nothing wrong with that. Perhaps the bikes were indeed washed up uncs, a decades-old friend group who met at the local bar each Sunday to watch the game. They have loving wives and loving children who just got their first jobs. Is that not enviable? What more can you ask for? I didn’t have to invent stories for each car because, in so far as every person’s life is rich, the stories were already rich enough.** Maybe the car had a little kid just like me leaning against the window. Maybe he’s asleep already. Or maybe he’s not, and in fact he’s playing the same game as I, and we just disappointed him by not being a motorcycle. It’s a pity we will never meet. Is not every vehicle passing by a ship in the night? A Sputnik sweetheart? On some level, I lived vicariously through every vehicle passing by, whether fantastical or commonplace.

I want to write up a conclusion myself, but I fear it’ll be colored by a comic I once read to such a degree that it’ll be tantamount plagarism. So I admit defeat and quote its ending in full: “and yet, to me, you are just a fragment of a figure passing by in the dark, just as I am to you. I remember [my dad] telling me that, on a clear night, you can see the lights of this city from space except from up there, he said, all of the lights appear connected.”

That night, the feeling was the same.

*There's a nice passage from Chesterton's Orthodoxy of which this reminds me: "Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony."

**There are trite images of bumper-to-bumper highway traffic with captions overlaid on each car, and I’m probably gesturing vaguely toward that sentiment, though I find this particular encapsulation fairly corny. Maybe it is better to picture those New Yorker magazine covers with an apartment building, in which each window has its own little thing going on: a lively party, a man working, a couple copulating.