It seems like there should be something symbolic about the in-between spaces.
The vast plain fields with everlasting flora and hidden fauna as it twists and stretches beyond your eager gaze. The farms and isolated houses that stand a mile or two apart, leaving you to wonder if a single soul has the willpower to greet their neighbor. These are the structures that you look at from the window of a rented car. The rented car that you picked up from the big parking lot, a few blocks from your place in the city, that has enormous and dormant vehicles ready at anyone’s disposal.
In this car, you make small shifting movements in order to turn and gaze over humans that manage to live in an open and far-apart manner. It seems like you are supposed to look at it and decide that there is a grand philosophical meaning of it all. Each stretch of green is a portrait: the farmers dedication to providing, given his seemingly horrid isolation; the small family that can afford to live there and nowhere else; many animals with their necks curved down to graze, but in a fenced-out piece of land— natural yet unnatural; or just the unused space that houses few and close to none.
The boundlessness stays with you as you go home and live off a newfound revelation for two weeks, before the hustle and bustle of the city gets to you again.
Days later, slouching against the counter making your morning coffee in pajamas and wondering if the farmer gets dressed before he makes his cup. Also, if he were to stand a bit straighter because he is a farmer after all. His title lends him a dated and ever needed trade persona. a stoic man that modern technology, no matter how advanced, cannot release him from this hard labor.
Don’t you see? It’s an analogy and its appreciated, its special.
And yet, none of it symbolic at all.
The farmer does not rise in the morning to the pride of being a passerby’s motivation, he rises to tend to his cattle and kiss his wife. The border collie does not run in that vast land because he is aware of a life that could be couped up in a car that heads back to a small apartment, he runs because of the terrain he was granted.
The farm will stand there when you pass it on the way there and the way back. It will remain once you get inside your apartment and go to work.
It will never think of you as you yearn for its false prophecy.
Born and raised in Chicago, Lauren Scott is a senior at DePaul University majoring in Writing, Rhetoric, & Discourse. She also minors in both French and Philosophy and works as a peer writing tutor at DePaul’s Writing Center. In her free time, Lauren enjoys writing by bodies of water.