For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
There’s something pure and merciless about that stop sign planted there on the tracks in Davenport like some bureaucratic punctuation mark that wandered off the highway and decided to make camp where the ocean meets rust and gravel. It’s T.S. Eliot crystallized into eight sides of fading red paint, this monument to endings that won’t shut up about beginnings, standing sentinel over a stretch of nowhere California where the Pacific keeps its eternal appointment with the continent’s frayed edge. The image screams with that particular silence you only get when human infrastructure surrenders to salt air and time, when the whole gorgeous machinery of intention gets weathered down to pure gesture. It’s the kind of picture that makes you stop (pun intended, fuck it) and recognize that every terminus is just another threshold dressed in warning colors, every last word begging for what comes next. The tracks don’t care. The ocean doesn’t care. But that stop sign, man, that beautiful dumb stop sign keeps insisting there’s something worth pausing for, even as everything around it testifies to the futility of standing still.