Abject
Article Preface:
This content can be slightly sad.
Abject:
Tonight, I stood, abject, under the deep, penetrating orange of a street light at the base of the Red Rock Amphitheater under a dark and starry sky.
The goal had been to see the sunset over Denver. Alas, I arrived twenty minutes behind schedule, and twilight now reigned in the sky. Through the darkness, I climbed the stairs of the theater and gazed out at the dazzling Denver city lights. My eyes watered, glistening.
It was only twenty minutes before a security officer with a blinding flashlight arrived on the scene to tell me that the park had closed. My eyes slowly re-adjusted from the blaze of the flashlight in the darkness, and I tried not to trip on any of the wide, gaping concrete steps as I made my way back to where my Uber ride dropped me off.
“Hey, man. You have a car up here?” a facilities management officer asked me, catching me in the headlights of the truck as I stumbled along the starlit road back to the entrance of the park. “No,” I said. “I was going to call an(other) Uber.” He said that the office down the road is well-known to drivers, and offered me a ride to the office, which I found myself accepting. As I climbed into the passenger’s seat, thoughts of him swiftly wielding a loaded syringe and plunging it deep into my thigh raced to my head. If I jumped out of the car at these downhill speeds, I would be both hypodermically impaled and concussed. Thinking back, this decision was not made intelligently in the slightest. So, why did I make it?
But these nightmares did not manifest; I arrived intact at the base of the park, waiting for my second Uber to return me to downtown Denver. And there I stood, abject, wondering why I spasmodically chased the sunset into the red rocks. But, of course, I knew exactly why.
Notes/References:
None for this article.
Updates:
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2026-08-22: Clarified what was meant by “upsetting.”
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2026-09-22: This was dated incorrectly before. The correct date is 2026/03/20, not 2026/03/19.
