an open monologue to Interstate Highway 635

Well, well, well, I-635. It has been awhile. I haven’t traveled westward in many moons, but on this day I must.

Do you know that feeling, I-635, that feeling of freedom as you careen onto the highway, young and carefree, only to slam on the brakes at a wall of stopped cars? That’s the feeling you make me feel, time and time again.

I should know better. But like a bad boyfriend, you entice me time after time. I have a blank space, I-635, and I wrote your name in it. You are the Justin Bieber to my Selena Gomez. The Chad Kroeger to my tube-topped shot girl.

I see that you recently bribed Google Maps. (“Everyone has a price,” I imagine you said to it, openly caricaturing 1920s East Coast Italian-Americans.) When I approach you, that titillating green traffic line will draw me onto the entrance ramp, only to suddenly bleed red when I have passed the point of no return. Everyone’s on your payroll, I-635. Everyone but me.

I guess part of me thought we could be friends for awhile. “Maybe just a quick trip,” I would say to myself. But there is no mercy on your three lanes of hell, narrowed down to one lane of superhell.

But today. Today will be different.