Asphalt

It’s a beautiful day. Perhaps even more special than beautiful. You can’t read a single thing around you, and ever person is speaking gibberish. Except for the three friends who accompany and are able to understand you, you cannot communicate with anyone beyond vague hand symbols, vague emotions, vague noises, and vague objects. The air around you is thicker than a solid lead pipe, and everyone is thinking the exact same, completely opposite thought. It feels as though you’re being struck by a harmless lightning bolt, and being fed the world’s richest chocolate. Then comes a loud noise, that you won’t even hope to identify, and you know it’s about to begin. Another amazingly deafening noise, and the temperature around you shoots up by twenty degrees. The familiar colors red, white and blue fly in a formation known to you as France. Through the square aperture below that flag begins to roll sixty-four shapes of various colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, white, and many more. Many you recognize, a few you do not, but all have come to wage war. It is a bloodless battle, that has been fought on this same battleground for more than a century. Like it’s sibling wars that are continually fought around the world, the aim is quite different from the common war. The goal is not to spill blood, take gold, or steal land. The goal is to break hearts, and to break metal. If you’d been confused earlier, you know exactly what’s happening now. As those 64 shapes disappear to deploy into battle, everyone is thinking only two thoughts. One you share with them. It’s the reason you’re here. It’s what makes you need to be here. It is thinking of the greatest art form and the greatest work of it you can possibly behold. It is the greatest passion, the strongest desire, the greatest idea, and the greatest love. Superseded only by your family, and for some preceding even that. It’s what gives you your best dreams. The ones that feel real, the ones that you’re disappointed waking up from. The ones that, if you were to stay dreaming forever, you would still be okay. The other thought is vastly separate. It’s what determines who’s heart will break. It’s what chooses who will shout and jump with overwhelming joy, and who will fall to their knees and cry with anguish. Over the past eleven minutes you and those surrounding have been waiting for the silence to be broken. In what will follow some will be brutally put down by another, some will make life ending mistakes, and still others will simply die of exhaustion, but only one will survive to win. Now, with a ear splitting whine that to those around you represents the most beautiful sound in the entire world, the battle has begun. Others make fun of you for this, others laugh at you for this love, others say that this battle which you hold dear is a lie, and that it stands for nothing. But you and those around you know the truth. It’s a beautiful day, perhaps even more special than beautiful. You’re in Le Mans, France; witnessing one of the greatest battles on the face of the earth. The yearly battle, to determine who is the fastest man on the earth. It is indeed, a special day.