The Legitimate Heir

Winter steals the light early. I clocked out at 6:00 PM; it’s now 6:45. I live 15 miles away. The Grind—this is ninety minutes of my life, daily, sold for the privilege of earning the money to pay for the car that makes this grind necessary. Traffic was a stagnant river of red lights. Finally, I’m turning onto my street. Cue the boss music. The Final Boss: Parking.

Houses press together here, swallowing every inch of lawn, built long and thin without driveways—a design perfected to fit as many mortgages as possible onto a single block. The result? Overcrowding. A quiet, constant pressure.

Quick history recap. When America had to choose between investing in railways or highways, it chose highways. You guessed it. Officially, for progress and freedom. Unofficially, highways became scalpels for segregation, carving through and isolating Black and poor neighborhoods—a social wound the car and oil industries were happy to exploit for brand-new, sprawling markets. The simpler, all-encompassing answer, though, is capitalism. After WWI, cars blew up. They were sold to us as freedom itself—the open road, autonomy, the ultimate status symbol. But look at my street now: that promised freedom has metastasized into its opposite: a fleet of expensive metal cages fighting for scraps of public space. They created the car, then the poorly maintained roads to drive it on, then the gas to power it (which we go to war over). See the pattern? It’s a closed loop, and we’re the fuel.

So here I am, in the inheritance of those choices. My street is a colony of cars. There are four families in a one-family house. Why? Capitalism. Rents are insane. All the adults have cars—they’re fortunate, or their jobs demand it. There’s no real public transit. Was this by design? It doesn’t matter now. The trap is sprung.

I pull up to my reality. No spots. My boss forwarded an email I need to answer tonight. My mom called twice today; I told her I’d call back. This is the personal stake: the quiet hour I needed to think, to connect, to just be, is being cannibalized by this search. I finally park one street over. I’m “lucky.” If I’d said yes to drinks with colleagues, I’d be hunting three streets over at 10 PM, the gleaming testament to our collective predicament finally settled in for the night.

One day I’ll defeat the final boss. Or maybe the real victory is asking who built this game in the first place, and why we all agreed to play.