A Memory: writing prompt

I remember as a kid in the middle of the night suddenly deciding I wanted to lie down in an intersection of a busy road beneath a street light—just to see what would happen.

This memory might need some context.

I might have been out with friends doing stupid stuff. I wasn’t into drugs or drank. Nevertheless, we never ran out of dumb ideas. It might have been the randomness or a sense of power, of baiting fate that made me think lying down in a road was cool.

It might have also played into my sensibility surrounding ruins, abandoned spaces. The sudden shift in a four-lane road now seemingly empty of traffic that called to me to occupy it. The feeling that the street lights still worked, still did their job despite the fact that whatever they were designed to do was not necessary at that moment in time. It was about time, this encapsulated “now”, an invitation to step inside. I took it.

I can still recall the heat of the blacktop, the textured tarmac, the flashing colors of the stop light—like a lighthouse sending signals out into the darkness. I trusted that if a truck would come I’d feel the rumble in my body in time to skedaddle or hear the motor of an automobile racing along an empty highway. Indeed, in the quiet I heard the clicking of the mechanism that caused the light to change from yellow to red to green, a soft shushing as the light swayed in the breeze, my breath slowed, internalized, alert to danger yet confident—

I would live to see another day.

Write your own memory of late-night hijinks that have stayed with you or actually formed who you are as a person, a writer.