I blink on at 5:47 AM, and the world is still grey.
The first car approaches a rattling sedan with one flickering headlight. I watch it slow,
obedient to my red glow. Inside, a woman grips the wheel, mascara smudged
beneath her eyes. She's been driving all night, I think. Running toward something or away from it.
Her fingers drum the steering wheel, four taps, pause, four taps. A rhythm I've seen a thousand
times in a thousand different hands.
Green.
She disappears down the avenue, and I wonder if she'll find what she's looking for.
By 8 AM, I'm conducting a symphony. Minivans, packed to the brim with children and
backpacks. Delivery trucks that shudder and twitch with every brake. A cyclist who always,always runs my red .I've learned to expect him, this small rebellion at 8:17 exactly.
I see a man in a gray suit stop at my command. He stares straight ahead, but hishand
reaches across the center console to squeeze his passenger's knee just once, gentle. An apology? A promise? They don't speak . My yellow blinks. Green. They drive on, and I'll never know which it was.
This is my gift and my curse. I see everything and understand nothing.
The afternoon brings the school buses, blazing yellow like a distant cousin I've never met. Children press their faces against the windows, making shapes in the fog of their breath.
One girl always waves at me. I think she believes I'm alive.
She's right, in a way.
By midnight, the world goes quiet. A single car might pass every ten minutes. I keep cycling anyway, red, yellow, green, a heartbeat for an empty street. On these shifts, I think about the others. The traffic light on Fifth Main, who went dark last winter and never came back.
The one on Highway 9 who only ever blinks yellow now, a permanent warning, a permanent anxiety, an irrevocable change .
Sometimes I imagine we're all connected, a nervous system of lights stretched across the city, keeping everything flowing, keeping everyone safe. We never meet . We never speak.
But we're all here, watching.At 3 AM, a taxi stops at my red. The driver's head tilts back against the seat, eyes closed.
He's alone. The meter isn't running. My light bathes him in crimson, then amber, then green,and still he sits. Finally, he opens his looks directly at me, and nods like he knows.
Like he understands that I see him, too.
Then he drives away.
And I begin my dreary wait for sunrise, weary but certain.The circadian symphony seeps back into the air, unwavering in its return. Cars fade, chaos dims. The sky softens.
The grey of dawn returns, just as it did yesterday, just as it will tomorrow. I blink red, then yellow, then green . The world begins again, and so do I .
w poem
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