There is No There There
December 21, 2024
The DMV in my hometown is on a relatively major road (not the freeway, not the busiest roads, but it's a pretty important road), so I used to drive by it all the time. Going to middle school every day, we'd drive past the DMV. In high school once I got my license, I used to drive by it all the time to go to friends' houses and hang out. Now when I'm back to visit, I drive by when going to pick up groceries, get gas, and more.
I was back for the holidays for a few days this year, and I noticed something different for the first time in a long time. When you're driving east on the road, there's this wall on the backside of the DMV which is near where the road starts to curve left. The wall has been there for as long as I can remember, and in middle school or high school (it's been long enough that I forget), some kids were unfortunately driving too fast on that left curve and they ended up veering off and hitting that wall. I think the driver survived but the passenger was killed in that accident.
This was big news in a small town where much doesn't happen on a regular basis. It was obviously a tragedy. One life cut too short, one life permanently scarred with the memory of that day, and many more lives affected and grieving. For years after that accident there was always flowers on that wall commemorating the life lost that day. Right after it happened, the wall was still broken from the crash, but there were so many flowers you couldn't see the damage. Eventually they fixed the wall, but the flowers kept coming. And even more eventually the flowers slowly dwindled, but even after I graduated college and came back, there was always a single bouquet or flower on that wall every time I drove past the DMV.
But this holiday season I saw that finally there weren't any flowers. I don't know if I hadn't noticed it in the past few years, or if this really was the first time there were no flowers, but nonetheless the moment stuck with me.
Maybe the parents of the kid finally moved out of expensive California (many of our neighbors moved to Oregon, Colorado, Idaho, Texas for this reason, replacing all the familiar faces with young families excited to take advantage of the great schools that we once went to). But now there's nothing left there on the wall to remember that kid by. I might be the only one in town still thinking about the flowers on the DMV wall. The memory of that kid lives on in the hearts of his parents and friends, but without that bouquet next to the wall that memory is also now washed away from so many people's heads.
Those flowers were a token of remembrance. Without it, the city moves on to a new chapter full of people who weren't around when the accident happened, and now weren't around when flowers rested against the wall of the back of the DMV. The only thing that is consistent in the world is change. There's many things in my life that have changed over the years. I've dealt with the loss of family members and friends. I've suffered more trivial losses when my favorite restaurants close down, but for some reason this felt different. The flowers had been there for so long that I thought it was almost a permanent fixture in our town. But alas, everything is transient. There really is no there there.