Somewhere Outside the City

(In this piece, I imagine myself as the photographer.)

When I could get connected to the internet after several months, I discovered that Boards of Canada's new album had been released. I wanted to listen to it in the car while driving. At a time when connecting with other people seemed more difficult than ever, driving had become one of the few remaining ways of encountering the outside world. The city felt quieter than before—not empty, but immersed in a collective, involuntary silence. There was still traffic, though it flowed more freely, and somehow it seemed easier to endure than it once had. Streets, unfamiliar routes, and roads with no particular destination called to me more than ever.

On a relatively long local road, beneath a darkness faintly illuminated by the moon, the icy lights of the highway leading toward the city center appeared in the distance. The cool night air mingled with the rhythm of the music inside the car. Pulling over briefly at the roadside revealed a scene that seemed to belong less to an actual place than to the image of one: a small settlement of tightly clustered houses. The houses looked almost ghosty, and the road disappearing into the darkness turned everything into a suspended scene, a place where it was impossible to tell whether you were standing on the suburb or inside the memory of it—a place both inhabited and abandoned at once.

Night strengthens this quality. It is as though everything withdraws from its everyday function and becomes an image of itself. Houses with no lights on, a road untouched by passing cars. The moment resembled a familiar dream. In such moments, an image is no longer simply the record of a place; it becomes an encounter with a particular condition of time and space, where the past, the present, and the imaginary briefly converge.