Traffic Lights

Neat vertical rows of shining red facets assemble to a bright disc, almost perfectly circular, with just the tiniest bit of perspective foreshortening turning it into an upright oval. A pattern of glowing parallel red curves is reflected from the tunnel visor, just above and to the right of the disk, a cut off limb of the pedestrian signal peeks through the darkness lower and to the left. The shining red is echoed by the matrix of brake lights and rear lights between my eyes and the vehicular signal, and reflected by the spray of rain drops that repeatedly begins to cover the windscreen, before the windscreen wiper returns with a rubbery groan to clear the view onto the street again.

All the red lights are surrounded by a faint corona, from the watery film on the windscreen and a slight oily film on my glasses. A corona of red concentric circles around each drop of red light. And shining red star streaks from every drop of red light, slightly assymetric around each court of light, but in the same pattern repeated around all of them. Shadows of the boundaries of my glasses, and the sides of the tip of my nose frame the view, the rear view mirror is also shadowed and doubled into an abstract apparition, that partly overlaps the neatly accurate matrix of the red signal.

As I refocus on the mirror, the reds vanish into a phantom of doubled background fog, and the mirror frame opens up into the deep tunnel of the street behind me. Yellowish street lights reflected on the wet asphalt, dark squares and rectangles from the houses around, and irregular rhizomic black lines from the naked branches in between. Behind the inked pattern of the city, underneath a dramatic flourish of grey sirling clouds, there is a small sliver of blue shining sky, that neatlessly turns into an improbably intense yellow above a brumble of more black branches.

The signal in front of me turns from red to amber to green, foot hits pedal, my palm direkts the gear box along the humming of the engine, first gear, second gear, third.... The neon arrow on the tachometer climbs towards 50, fifth gear, the engine settles for a reliefed hum. The rear lights ahead are a comfortable distance away, white pairs of lights from the oncoming traffic, paired again by the shiny reflection on the wet asphalt, indicate tons of steel barrelling towards me, then passing narrowly to my left and vanishing behind.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on February 18, 2024 1:49am.

Say, Aunt Herbert, greatest story on your traffic experience. Makes me want to even visualize it in drawing form. Please show me and us some of your ruffest sketches of the lights. Thanks.

I wish I could draw that. I so wish. But I don't seem to get closer to finding any solutions.