The existential sit-in-the-car
Photo: Gerald Farinas.
The car is still, but the world is in motion. I sit in my parking lot pew, the sanctuary of a dashboard altar, windows all the way down, letting September air baptize me with a breeze that still carries the memory of summer but already hints at the sting of coming winter.
Lake Michigan breathes through the alleys of Edgewater, cool and insistent, reminding me that the city is alive, even if I am parked in its quiet backlot arteries.
My view? Not a postcard. The backside of Metropolis Coffee—an urban confessional dressed in brick and dumpsters, power lines scribbled like impatient pen strokes against the sky.
There’s no latte art here, only the naked truth of what sustains the storefronts we worship from the front: the refuse bins, the service doors, the gritty lungs that make the espresso-scented dream possible.
Cars flank me, silent companions in this moment. Each has its own story: someone’s commute paused, someone’s errand delayed, someone’s life threaded briefly with mine because fate or zoning laws decreed that we park in the same cracked asphalt lot.
And yet, here I am, in this stillness, as if the universe conspired to remind me that beauty isn’t always where we expect it. Sometimes it’s the play of light on brick, the shadow of fire escapes, the satisfaction of being unseen while seeing everything.
The breeze sweeps through again—like pages turning. I wonder what it carries with it.
Perhaps it’s yesterday’s conversations over coffee drifting out the back door.
Perhaps it’s fragments of gossip, hopes, worries, even laughter caught in the slipstream of the lake.
The air touches my face, as if to say, yes, you are still here. Yes, you are part of this too.
There’s something existential about staring at a dumpster with the clarity of sunlight hitting the corrugated lid just so.
It feels like a parable: the things we throw away still occupy space in the story of our lives. The backlot doesn’t pretend; it holds what we hide.
And yet, framed by sky and brick, even the dumpster becomes part of the architecture of my moment.
Maybe that’s what this sit-in-the-car ritual really is: the reminder that life is not only the front-of-house spectacle, polished for neighbors and customers, but also the quiet, unglamorous backside—where the breeze still finds its way in, where we’re left to breathe and think and simply be.
