Soulless cars, portable homes

By Milena Filipps

Under the influence of time in the shape of years, calendars and sunsets, we learn to believe that every town has a soul. It may be a collective memory, a view, an invention, a dialect, a name or a phantom encompassing a unique structure of history and chaos, care and carelessness, flowers and concrete, life and routine. We chase all this by turning into observers, outsiders, students of our own imagination staring back at us from every strange window, the glass either covered with curtains or rays of sunlight. Hiding prosaic life behind them, windows reflect our own idea of individuality back at us, while the world stares into the sky as its sole mirror.
We are reminded of everything beyond a beautifully melancholic present by the most common and disappointing trait of a town – endless, faceless cars. Adding as much ballast to our surroundings as massive walls on narrow streets, their colours never originate from this strange soul we seek. They appear from somewhere far away, a place without a place in our minds. Black and silver to underline modernity, yellow and red to embody power they have no need to demonstrate. We know. We are so used to them reshaping our cities every day. All our discoveries are made in their grey shadow.
Cars are ugly, boring, a waste of space. Metal boxes. Good for nothing. Polluting a city’s breath. They disrupt the atmosphere, the memories, the evenings and the sunrises. They dispel myths and phantoms, offering stereotypical dreams as compensation. An old symbol of blind progress. We are almost expected to admire it too along with the city’s silhouette. Never have we been as close to believing that its soul was vanishing. Scared away. Reshaped, replaced, a history put in the background.
But –
Is there a moment as beautiful as watching hundreds of trees run back towards the home you have just left, as if the world protested this negation of routine? How many songs have been discovered in cars? How many times have you been hiding in the car from the rain, from the clock on your office’s white wall, or even your own mirror? How often has your car provided a space between home and the outside world when you couldn’t move in either direction? You can put your favourite blanket on the back seat. Some food, a pen and paper, spare clothes, photos, books, a camera, memories, cosy pillows, an old umbrella. No need to leave anything behind. In an environment that worships temporality, dreams have a high chance of survival. Sometimes they sleep. Sometimes they mourn trivial impressions, forgotten just a minute ago. Sometimes they share our fears. Different ideals may strive towards opposite shores, yet occasionally some dream of ours will like the destination our intuition chooses. After all – how often has a car witnessed you give up an old home in favour of potential?
Over the years, our car will face never ending dusty roads and render too many cities utterly unromantic. We’ll travel almost too much; walk past half-timbered houses dating to the 16^th century, study the features of a time that can only be accessed through projection and imagination, dream all the dreams; we’ll seek a soul in the very heart of every little town and, lastly, we’ll find those spaces to be more flexible, more challenging and arbitrary than our own ambitions. There will be no more pain in acknowledging the charms of ideas without chasing them. We’ll accept both time and the cities it creates as ever-expanding realms of all things lost. Culture, meaning, memory and motion. Yet, in the middle of it all, dreams decaying like paint peeling off walls, we’ll remain naturally attached to phantoms, either in the shape of flowers once spotted on a balcony or in the shape of the blanket your hand grabs from the back seat of your car almost mechanically.

Milena Filipps is a history student in Germany. She enjoys reading works by Marcel Proust, Jane Austen and Goethe as well as learning about art history and historical architecture. Her essays “Academic Reading” and “My Glasses” (2023) were published by Livina Press, while her poems appeared in Swim Press (2023), The Field Guide Poetry Magazine (2023) and RIC Journal (2021), among others. You can find her on Instagram (@milenafilipps)