Detour

Two kilometres from home, a stretch of road deeply submerged in floodwater brought traffic to a near standstill for two hours. The car's fuel gauge read nearly empty, the temperature reading indicated the danger of overheating, so when an opportunity to make a U-turn opened, I did.

The long way home takes around an hour and a half, goes up easily one side of the mountain then steeply down the other. I stopped about halfway, somewhere near the top, sat on a rock smoking a cigarette. The city below looked somewhat sad; the usual sea of lights was marred by black holes of power outages.

Afterwards, speeding down the lonely mountainside road, there came a sharp feeling of missing someone terribly, but couldn't remember whom.

The trouble with flash floods is that garbage rises to the surface, and things you have already thrown away float back.