Every day, I spend approximately 2.25 – 3.25 hours in traffic. Every day, around 2.25-3.25% of my spirit dies. I’m really dramatic about traffic.
One of my friends suggested that I write about my traffic updates, and to be honest, I often think about live tweeting my treacherous journey through soul-wrenching (and you’ll understand why I use that word further down, keep reading) LA metro area traffic. But then I realized,
- there’s already an app for that, it’s called Waze. Inventiveness fails me, evidently.
- Driving in a car is the worst time to live-tweet, because I could a] crash and hurt myself and others b] it’s ILLEGAL.
Still. There’s some high (and I mean all kinds of high) and mighty fools who still think they can handle texting and driving. If you are reading this, and you do this – don’t be a fool. Be cool. (This brilliantly-crafted PSA was brought to you by your friendly neighbor, SriHarshu.) Anyway, sometimes I’m a fool too. I put on makeup (contrary to Bey, very few people wake up like this), but it’s the kind where it doesn’t have to be precise. Like coverup, not like an on-fleek cat-eye or anything. I’m never on-fleek for anything anyway. (A teenager told me a few weeks ago to never use that word again. It hurt me. I’m young enough to use it.)
But back to my morning commute. If hell is a thing, and if it’s personalized and manufactured for each beneficiary, then I suppose I’m lucky to have found mine. It would be sitting in LA traffic forever, going five miles per hour, never speeding up, never slowing down, obvious fools honking at you to close the 2-centimeter distance between yourself and the car in front of you. And lastly – like the fiery caramelization of a sickening creme brulee (Ingredients: a cold-hearted resentment of the people in the cars around you, impatient frustration, and the unwavering sensation to pee) – this hell would mean I never reach my destination. Forever sitting in traffic – whatever repentance is, I’ll do it to avoid that fate.
Anyway, it doesn’t always start off that bad. Sometimes, I’ll get into the car and say to myself, “Girl, today is gonna be that one amazing commute. You got this, babe. Power to you.” That’s never the case, though. By the end of my commute, I have my Kim K ugly crying face on. Yes, I go 100 to 0, real quick, real quick.
My 32-mile commute usually goes like this:
Get into car. Situate all my crap in the passenger seat. Set my coffee cup in the holder. Sigh. Pray. Turn on NPR. Sigh again. Set car in reverse. Get onto freeway. Swagging for the first 10 miles. Tolerate the fools cutting me off. 60 mph. Slow down. Situate all my crap that has flown off the passenger seat. Sigh. Inch along for the next 15 miles. Stretch my sore old-lady hips. Take off my shoes and drive barefoot. Spill drops of coffee on pants. Brush on coverup. Recognize the mean motorcyclist with the neon jacket who scares you. Feel a reckless sense of envy looking at her motorcycle.
At mile 22, acknowledge ever-impending stress. Finish coffee, now cold. Slam off NPR – shut up, Steve Julian. Put on old-school hip-hop station, KDAY. Slam that off too, Bones Thug-n-Harmony just doesn’t get it. Fill in eyebrows. Look angrily around the car to understand who are all these idiots that are clogging the road. Look at my steering wheel angrily because I know I am one of those idiots, except I’m also a hypocritical idiot.
After a half hour, we’ve hit mile 27. Guy in a Chevy truck with those dumb stick family decals cuts you off without signaling. (He would signal if he cared about his family.) Explode into my personal composition of expletives, including Telugu and Hindi ones. Continue to swear. Feels like a beautiful multilingual symphony. Take a deep breath. Realize I’m probably breathing my own cortisol-laced, recycled air. Feel hot, but not in a Olivia-Pope way. In a heat-stroke way. Feel impatient. Crack my neck. Crack my fingers. Crack my cool. We’ve hit mile 28. Stare at people talking to others in carpool. Look at your reflection in the personal mirror. Talk to myself as if I was also in a carpool. Berate myself for not carpooling. Inch along. It’s mile 30 – exit coming up. Thank the lord. Merge, merge, merge, let me in muphugga! Merge. Exit. Compose myself. Too late, cool is too far gone (left it at mile 20). Pull into parking lot. Sigh. Think about crying. Realize liquid must be released in other ways after 2 glasses of water, coffee, and a 1.25 hour commute. Gather my stuff which has long been un-situated off the passenger seat onto the floor. My apple has positioned itself in the sole of my heel. Look at the time. It’s 8:42 AM. My day is over.
This is pretty normal. Very hum-de-dum. But the other day, this happened:
Get into car. Situate all my crap in the passenger seat. Set my coffee cup in the holder. Sigh. Pray. Turn on NPR. Sigh again. Set car in reverse. Get onto freeway. Great, a slow-down. Running late. Pull up Waze. There’s been a a major accident. Sigh. It’s mile 8. I see flashing lights. Engage in the morbid curiosity to look and become part of the traffic bottleneck that I cursed 3 miles back. The EMTs are just closing the door on the ambulance. There’s a motorcycle off the side of the road. There’s a black jacket hanging off of it. Turn my attention back to the road. The po-po have mostly cleared up the debris – there’s part of a hubcap maybe, some glass, some metal. Then, my stomach drops.
A shoe.
Among all these indistinguishable mechanical materials, there’s a men’s dress shoe, upright as if someone were going to slip into it and, you know, head off to work like every other morning. Even from yards away, I can tell it’s been polished black, mostly gleaming in the SoCal morning sun. Even the laces still look tied. It’s sitting on the left of the carpool lane divider, so it’s easy enough for cars to avoid. I swallow. Like everyone else, I continue my commute.
It was a common human artifact interacting with our modern pathways. Nothing special, really. I’m not going to say that seeing this shoe gave me new perspective, or even calmed my emotions every morning on the way to work. It didn’t. I might have even gotten angrier because I’m like, who are the idiots (you best believe that’s not the word I used) that are so negligent in their driving that they hit someone hard enough to knock a shoe off? They’re so careless! How about I knock an E out instead and make them carless. (Actually, that’s what should happen. Impound their cars, I say!) And maybe it was the motorcyclist’s fault. I dk.
I was talking to my supervisor about this shoe incident. He said this is one of those moments that don’t leave a person, sometimes for no particular reason, sometimes because they haunt you. Apparently, as a young adult in the 195os (I love his back-in-the-day stories), traffic was stuck at a standstill (times really haven’t changed). Since nobody was moving, he and his brother get out of the car to walk around and scope out the situation, like it was a freaking park instead of a parking lot. Further up, there was a Plymouth pulverized by a logger truck. Fender – gone. Bumper – gone. People – gone.
But the man’s shoes. Apparently, they were in the sitting in the exact position they would have been if he had still been driving. The accident had literally knocked his shoes off, and it left behind…
the soles. The souls.
A friend once described to me that cars are basically huge metal boxes that are somehow hurtling at 60 miles per hour through space, and we trustingly place ourselves in those boxes to reach our destinations. Between the rigidly painted white and yellow lines, there are people nestled inside the cars. They’re going somewhere to make a living, or to drop their kids off at school, and who knows, maybe they’re just unnecessarily clogging up the roads, much to my unwarranted disdain. And something inside me beats more urgently every time there’s an accident.
So I see that shoe. The sole/soul of man left behind. It’s unsettling not because of its implications (that he was killed, and maybe painfully), but because of its banality. We all put on shoes. We’re all a little dazed as we drive to work. We’re all careless and negligent and pissed. We don’t signal. We cut people off. We are engaging in our shared mundane lives together without even knowing it. And not all of us will make it to the destination. Our souls/soles are impatient (maybe just mine, though) as we sit and allow these metal boxes to transport us, spending hours, days, weeks even in traffic. Weren’t our soles/souls meant to be utilized? What a strange, communal and comforting hell.
But you know, maybe there’s people who LOVE their commutes. Whatever. I don’t have anything to do with those people, they probably don’t talk anyway because when you complain about traffic, you’re automatically part of a community.
Drive safe out there, people.
S H R 
