I set off around ten in the morning and arrived in Beijing at eleven at night, sleeping for one hour in between — at a rest stop, of course. The route took me along the G30 Lianhuo Expressway to Fengling Ferry into Shanxi, then onto the G5 Jingkun Expressway, passing through Linfen, Hongtong, Lingshi, and Pingyao to Qi County, where I switched to the Yuqi Expressway and the Taijiu Expressway to Yangquan, then back onto the G5 to Shijiazhuang, and finally onto the G4 Jinggang'ao Expressway to Beijing.
In Shanxi, the sky shifted from light to dark, until it was swallowed entirely by night. Dusk was the loneliest hour — the world brimmed with music, melancholy, and illusion. Ahead lay nothing but open expanse; the highway guardrails looked like the surface of a mirror-still sea, and time slowly rose like water. In my mind I was thinking of Tarcy Su's song "Illusion": And so I suspect / that this endless highway / wanting to reach the sky / is only an illusion, an illusion. / And so I doubt my senses — / everything I see / is only an illusion.
As I raced along the Third Ring Road toward my place, the clock crossed into 2018. That was my last day of 2017.