Fair.

You get into the bumper car, like someone who knows his place in a dream that is not governed by any logic, as if you no longer expect the world to conform to you, but you move with a gentle resignation toward the crumbling remains of the known, dressed in black that does not set off but dissolves into the shadow of forgotten things, and your thoughts—gray, viscous as mist over a lake where no one ever swims anymore—swarm around like slow moths in a room where the light is just enough to notice them but not enough to chase them away.

And as you sink into the decaying seat of a bumper car that’s being crunched by roots as if the earth itself has decided this party has gone on long enough, the light on top blinks with a kind of weary fervor—white, not bright white, not hopeful white, but the white of an old fluorescent tube sharing its last flickers with no one in particular—and you think of how it used to be a place of screaming children, hands clutching the steering wheel as if control was something you could grasp at in plastic cars that went nowhere but in circles.

The trees have nestled without invitation, their roots through metal and their branches like fingers trying to grasp back something long lost—the freedom of wild growth versus the mechanics of amusement, and you, in the middle of it, an anachronism in a black suit, among the foliage of what was once a floor and now looks like an oversized tree leaf with veins of broken concrete, as if the entire fair were a page from an out-of-print book.

Birds—you don't even know which ones, you don't know anything about birds, but they're small, fidgety, trying to build what you've long since stopped believing can exist: a home, here, among the discarded machinery and the rustling of leaves that no longer want to experience autumn—and you wonder, as your hands grip the steering wheel with a certain solemnity as if you were still steering something, whether unhappiness is a place, or a rhythm, or just the logic of staying in a vehicle that has no direction.

You don't feel much, or perhaps too much, but everything is muffled, covered with the gray dust of thinking too often without deciding anything—the color of old memories of joy, without the joy itself having a face anymore, only the feeling that you once laughed here, in this exact spot, before the branches began to grow, before the green took over the advertising light and replaced the cries of joy with the whispering of wind between leaves.

And you sit there, and you press your feet into the pedals that no longer do anything, and you wait for the light to stop flashing or for you to disappear into it—whichever comes first.