The Last Exit into Darkness
The highway unfurls like a dark ribbon through a night that refuses to thin. I keep driving because stopping feels like admitting I’ve already lost, and the car’s engine hums a lullaby that sounds suspiciously like a countdown. Ahead, the last exit signs blink a tentative welcome, as if the road itself is inviting me to surrender to a darkness that doesn’t merely lie beyond the horizon but grows inside the windshield, breathing with me, watching me, waiting for a confession I am not ready to give.
Some roads don’t lead anywhere you expect. They lead you to yourself—and the version you fear most.
The exit ramp peels away the familiar. My fuel gauge sighs as though it remembers a different town, and the air grows heavy with an odor I cannot name—metal and rain and something older, like a secret buried beneath old asphalt. The sign at the end of the ramp is slashed, letters peeling in a language I almost understand: EXIT, then a word that isn’t a word but a pulse in the night. I ease off the pedal and the car slows not from gravity, but from the insistence of a truth I have denied for too long.
On the shoulder, a figure stands—not a hitchhiker, but a memory wearing a coat. When I roll down the window, the cold hits me with the reverence of a church bell. The figure says nothing, only nods toward the dark lane that steers away from the few scattered lights and into a corridor of black where even the stars seem to draw closer to witness what comes next.
- A clock in a closed grocery store ticks backward, each second a tiny shiver tearing at the present.
- A radio crackles to life with voices that whisper maps, directions to nowhere, as if the road itself is drawing a secret itinerary over my spine.
- Headlights in the distance vanish into silhouettes that don’t move so much as they breathe, a living crowd of shadows waiting for someone to acknowledge them.
- Windows reflect another car—the same model, the same route—but the driver in the reflection wears a smile that isn’t mine.
- A toll booth appears where there should be none, offering a ledger of sins rather than a receipt, asking me to pay with a memory I’ve sworn I forgot.
The last exit looms with a figure at the edge of the pavement—a child, perhaps, or a fragment of myself, holding a lantern that refuses to cast a proper light. The lantern’s glow is a stubborn rumor: it promises safety but never delivers it; it promises answers but hands back more questions than before. As I approach, the road seems to inhale, pulling me deeper into a fear that tastes like rain and old gasoline.
The road remembers every traveler who has ever believed they could outrun a fear that is only a reflection in the rearview mirror.
When at last I cross the threshold marked by that cracked sign, the world grows quiet, not peaceful but attentive, as if the darkness has set down a cup of tea and is waiting to hear my story. The last exit is not a doorway to an ending, but a corridor into a truth I have always carried inside: that darkness is not a place you escape from, but a road you become. And somewhere beyond the black, I hear the road itself sigh, and it sounds not like fear, but like a welcome home I never asked for.