Ballad of the Lost Mile

Perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident I drift off the crowded expressway onto deserted side roads. 

The fast, noisy highway is, to me, an image of the mainstream: life rushing in relentless pursuit, always in a predetermined direction. Peripheral roads, where the city meets wild nature, seem like a refuge of calm and balance, a return to an older, slower rhythm of living. 

By late nightfall, suburban nature stoically endures beneath the distant glow of civilization’s night lights. In that quiet, it becomes easier to slow down and see how swiftly the modern world is transforming. 

Buildings, cars, billboards, gas stations, service points — captured in photographs only a few years ago — now look completely different. If they still exist at all. These surrounding changes carry not only a material but also a metaphysical dimension. Listening to the news, one might feel that an entire era is slowly dissolving before our eyes. 

Despite caricature-like constructions, old cars, and landscapes deserted as if in an apocalypse, I want to remain in this world. Here I find respite, an escape from routine, a shelter from bad news. I savor it before it disappears into the darkness of the rear-view mirror. 

When searching for a detour around a jammed highway, I usually return quickly at the nearest open junction. This journey is different: here, not arrival but the road itself — the very act of “getting lost” — becomes the destination. I want this ride — like a sentimental ballad about the vanishing world — to last as long as my strength holds, until sleep inevitably overtakes me.