Red Light, Green Light

Leah sat at the last red light on her way home. After five hours of steady driving on awful roads, she was ready to fall into her old bed and sleep for at least ten. The interstates and turnpikes in her state were infamous for their state of disrepair, so Leah tended to avoid leaving her university for home visits unless absolutely necessary. Every time she did she worried her beat-up Civic would break down or burst a tire as it limped its way across the Texan scenery.

She stared absently at that traffic light between her and her bed, thinking about everything that had led her up to this exact moment. She noticed the light turned green while thinking about high school, but it didn’t register in her head to move along as the traffic light bid her to. Luckily it was nearing midnight and there weren’t any other cars around as the old engine rumbled and Leah wondered how her AP classes didn’t really amount to much.

Graduating near the top of her class didn’t matter in college; nearly everyone there had done pretty well in high school and after the first six months realized nothing done before university was important. As it neared 2030 most people Leah’s age were starting to think nothing they did in college was going to matter either. With every passing month, it seemed more and more most people were paying tens of thousands of dollars to gain access to a networking opportunity. If one was good at taking advantage of the environment they could coast by on mediocre effort but still find more success than someone who only focused on grades.

The light turned yellow, and Leah knew she was running out of time.

She wanted to stop facing reality and move, get back to the family that supported and loved her, back to that warm, comforting atmosphere she had known all her life. The first three years of college ran through her mind instead, and the light turned red again. Her gaze was focused on the light. Her mind didn’t even acknowledge it. She thought about the sleepless nights she spent cramming for tests or writing assignments. The awkward introductions at networking events that never lead to a callback or even an email. She stopped going in her junior year after all those miserable, humiliating failures.

Leah didn’t know how she was supposed to find a job after graduation. She didn’t know anybody that could find her a position, she never got to know her professors well enough to earn their recommendations, she only had her close-knit group of friends. While she loved them, she knew they weren’t going to be able to help her career. A lot of her fellow seniors were in the same boat. The light turned green again, and the change beckoned her back to the real world enough for her to notice the radio. The sound had faded into the background when she started reflecting, but now it provided an upbeat pop soundtrack to her existential dread.

STEM probably would have been a good field to go into, if only she had an interest. At least there a job would have been easier to come by thanks to the demand. Green, yellow, red. Scenes of her childhood where she declared she would be an attorney putting the bad guys in jail drifted across her vision and coalesced into that red light. Of course, back then she was naive; she didn’t know about the meager success the majority of lawyers enjoyed, and once she had become aware of the prison industrial complex her desire to contribute died.

A mid-sized sedan pulled up behind Leah, but she barely noticed it. All she was aware of was a different, brighter light in her review mirror that contradicted the red one she had grown accustomed to. Ignoring the newcomer, Leah wondered if she should drop everything and run away from what faced her. Maybe the US wasn’t right for her. Maybe she could give herself a second chance and start over in a different place with different people, a different society. Start over. An upward curl teased her lips in amusement; a girl her age talking about starting over? The light turned green.

The car behind her waited for a second, then honked. Leah blinked rapidly as she adjusted to the world, looked at the green light, and realized she had to move. She shifted into first and prepared to take off, finally get home and rest, take her mind off things for a few days.

Still slightly dazed from her daydreaming she pressed on the gas to get going... and stalled. The driver of the other car lost their patience and drove around her. Leah restarted her car and looked at the dim yellow light threatening to stop her in her tracks once again; this time she pushed off and kept moving forward.