Nobody in the next lane knows I'm watching them the way I am. We're all stopped dead on the interstate, brake lights bleeding red up the hill, and the woman in the sedan beside me is doing the thing everyone does: gripping the wheel, checking the clock, mouthing something at nobody. Furious at a delay measured in minutes.
I get it. I do. I lose the same minutes to a slow elevator now.
But I keep thinking about the fuel. Every one of these engines idling, thousands of them nose to tail, dumping exhaust into the only air we have. From two hundred fifty miles up you can't see a single road. You can't see this jam, or the country it runs through, or any line drawn on any map.
What you can see, if the light catches it right at the edge of the planet, is the atmosphere itself: a blue rind maybe sixty miles deep, thinner against the black than the skin on an apple. That's the whole thing. That's all the breathable air there is or will ever be, and it does not refill from anywhere.
So I sit in my own idling car, going nowhere, contributing my share, and I don't feel superior about it. I feel caught. Same as everyone.
The woman finally gets a gap, lurches forward two car lengths, stops again. Rolls her window down an inch for some air.
I want to tell her that inch of air is the whole miracle. That there's nothing above it but nothing.
I just wave her in ahead of me instead.