The Google Maps Car
It’s been over 10 years since the google maps car came by my house. I’ve been starting to think they’re not coming again. It’s so windy and cold where I live. The winter gets real bad. I like the autumn, I like when all the Halloween stuff goes up and then I love Thanksgiving. I love to think about what I’m thankful for. One thing I’m really thankful for is the day the google maps car came by my house. I was outside with my parents and we stood up and waved. We’re in the picture it took, and sometimes I go back and look at it. My face is blurred out along with my parents’ faces, because they have to blur out the faces of the people in the photos they take. But even though it’s blurred you can tell we were smiling. I was so happy. It was an autumn day, and I remember it was bright out, even though the photo looks really dark. In the bottom corner it says “Image capture: Oct 2008” for the whole length of my street, and I know the street so well that as I click down it I can almost feel the cold wind on my face. It’s 2011 on the next street over, and you have to click for miles to find anywhere in the 2020s. Sometimes in the middle of the night I go walking on google street view for hours, clicking through all sorts of strange times and places. I love when, after a hundred monotonous clicks, the next click all the sudden changes everything, the year, the season, the time of day. I wonder if anybody has ever clicked through to my street in the same way, and seen me and my family waving to them all. I wish time would stop. My mind can’t process all the changes. My family is so different now. Things change so much. They change and move every second. As soon as the google maps car leaves your street they’re already out of date. Even if they came back every day they couldn’t keep up. Things move and change so much but they also don’t change that much, and my mind can’t make sense of it. Because when I click up and down my street in 2008 I see so much of the same stuff in the exact same place. But how? It’s been so long. And things aren’t the same, even if they’re in the same place. Things are so different, I can feel it in my bones.