Main Character Vibes

Ending or something like it

There was something deep and existential about the still hours on the other side of midnight. Those predawn hours when a bustling city sleeps in the almost pitch-black darkness; illuminated only to the extent of its waning light pollution. Those hours when humidity descends...when the streets are empty of the people's workday fight or flight responses...and the abandoned pavements are trotted upon by nothing but falling streetlight. During those existential hours, the mundane things of every day, the details that are taken for granted, suddenly gain magical qualities some would say. There was something existential about the night.

The pitch-black darkness of the night enveloped the highway where Elias had been driving nonstop for almost an hour. Not quite out of Toronto but far enough. He was escaping out of the city, where the thin veneer of civilization was tested during a night that was scraped by a knife that had taken two innocent lives...

The highway on which he drove was beyond the reach of the crowding buildings of the metropolis and barely touched by its riot of lights. Glimmering lights that only existed as an apparition of a skyline in Elias's rearview mirror. The skyline looked at from out in this distance was always the city looked at for the first time with its promises of greatness...or the last time with its tragedies of failure. The city itself was becoming smaller and smaller or perhaps because there was more space outside Toronto's limits, he was the one who was becoming bigger and bigger.

Silence reigned, except for the mild humming of the car's engine and the intermittent whirring of trucks and cars as they passed him by...darkness reigned, except for their headlights from whence they drove in the opposite direction...headlights that reflected off his car's side mirrors to briefly light up his expressionless face in sporadic streaks, before they fully passed him and there was nothing but darkness again.

Elias was driving westward. Driving resolutely into the night...to the point where he could even taste the half-moon hanging low in the October sky building up to its harvest. In the midst of darkness, a red and blue neon sign electrified the air around the word that it spelled: 'Inn.' 

Elias slowed down and pulled into the inn's parking lot; he needed a drink. Witnessing death twice in a night can do that. But more so perhaps, he wanted to outsource the decision of whether to turn himself in or keep chasing sunrises to the fates. It was too much to contend with.

The road out of home always led west...perhaps it is by the education of celestial objects that the journey from beginning to end is symbolized by the sun's journey from the dawning east to the setting west. Beginning and end...and, for a lucky few, perhaps rebirth. Elias entered the inn.

The End, maybe