The van was alive. The little souls in its belly swelled, bursting with excitement, cheering it on as it quickened its pace to a maximum- The fast lane. Nothing mattered but the wanton touch of rubber limbs teasing tarmac. Its heart whistled in content, filled with fuel, finally feeling the fulfillment that follows putting all you have to a task and knowing, knowing there's no thing you've held back. Its valves had never opened so wide to let in so much. Excitement tightened hold on a steaming heart, like cardiac arrest. This tasted like speed. Caution was thrown to the still air; absolute wind against the van’s skin. Some of the souls inside pulled the shutters across the windows, drawing protest from their peers who ordered the windows opened. Closed, opened, closed, and opened, like blinks. It soon became a stupid game for the few seated by the windows. Next to no time, they'd been sucked into the laughter and superficial conversation that matched the excitement inside the van.
Little black dresses, tight trousers, half-buttoned shirts revealing chests hairless from youthfulness, freshly gelled hair; gloriously black, and first-time jewels. They looked beautiful(ly dressed) inside the van. The ugly unlucky earned attention lurking around the faces at the center of most camera lenses. For them recognition took some trying. ('Count us among 'the living'', their egos can’t not have been crying) Looking into this buzzing swarm of young faces I’m calling souls felt like true soul-searching; Beauty blotched, unforgivably, by the love of money, existentialism, the in-genuineness of our own kindness, and instincts of self-preservation. -Dressing to kill, speaking to impress, thinking to manipulate, agreeing to please, playing to win... At the root its all evil.
But that wasn’t in the picture now. No one cared for such trivialities, unpleasant and misplaced. (No one in the van cared, because the poor and the ugly don’t exist in such paintings. When the bulk is good, the unfitting strokes even build to the bulk's beauty, bestowing credibility to the picture as a whole) Everyone was sucked into the laughter and conversation that held the moment suspended above any other. This moment was the cream, however thin, of their years together in school. They clang on to the little re-tellings of how ‘awesome’ the dinner had been, stubbornly refusing to simmer down to the doubtful promises and sweet sorrows that typify goodbye. It'd be eminent the next morning anyway, so why bother right now?
A deserted empty gate gaped open, boasting its tall bright lights to the night. A van descended to a halt in front of it, engine grumbling as its driver waited for his passengers to alight. The gate would soon swallow them and the van would zombie back into lonely lanes to haunted highways, dead as steel.
