Red Lights Are A Mirror
Last Tuesday, 8:47 PM, I was idling at the intersection of Crescent and 5th. The light was red. I’d been stopped there for what felt like forty seconds but was probably only fifteen. That’s when I looked up — not at the light, not at the countdown timer, but at the side mirror of the SUV parked two lanes over.
And I saw myself.
Mascara smudged under one eye. Hair completely flat on the left side where I sleep on it. Mouth hanging open halfway like I was about to say something but forgot what. There’s a small red dot near my chin from where I squeezed a pimple in the rearview at 7:55 AM and then didn’t put anything on it because I was already late.
That face looking back at me in someone else’s mirror? That wasn’t the face I thought I was wearing. That wasn’t the girl who walked out of the apartment at 7:30 feeling good about the new blazer. That was someone who’d been running from red light to red light all day trying to get somewhere that doesn’t actually exist.
I never thought about red lights as mirrors before. They were just pauses. Annoyances. The thing that made me late for hot yoga last Wednesday because I caught every single one between the studio parking lot and the front door of the building. Whatever, fifteen minutes late, nobody cared, I cared.
But somewhere in the last six months — and I can’t even pinpoint when — red lights started feeling heavier. Like they were doing something on purpose. Like whoever programmed them knew.
I brought this up with Jess last Saturday at her kitchen counter. Both of us holding glasses of wine neither of us really wanted. She’d opened a bottle to “celebrate” her divorce being final but she wasn’t drinking it, just tilting the glass back and forth watching the light come through the merlot. I was holding mine the same way.
“You ever feel like red lights are actually doing something?” I said.
She laughed. Not a happy laugh. The other kind.
“I hate how when you stop moving,” she said, “your brain starts.”
I nodded. We sat there for maybe a minute without talking.
I thought about leaving then. Saying something funny, refilling the glasses, putting on music. Instead I just stood there holding my wine.
She was right. The second I stop — at a light, in line at CVS, waiting for the elevator at the doctor’s office — that’s when the thoughts I’d been outrunning come back. The text I didn’t send to my dad three weeks ago. The thing I should’ve said in the standup on Tuesday but didn’t because I didn’t want to seem difficult. The way my mom’s voice got small when I told her I wasn’t coming home for her birthday because the flights were too expensive and we both knew that wasn’t the real reason.
Red lights don’t let you escape them. They just sit there, glowing red, until you finally look up and notice.
It happened again Thursday morning. 8:12 AM. The light at Madison and Lexington — the one that always takes forever when you’re on 71st trying to get to work. I had nowhere to be for another forty minutes. The coffee was still warm in the cup holder. The podcast I was listening to was that thing about enneagrams that everyone was doing last year.
I turned it off.
The car was quiet. Just the engine. Just me breathing.
And I could feel it starting. That pressure in my chest that comes right before I start performing for myself. The review. The internal standup. Did I send the email? Did I remember to defrost the chicken? Did I lock the front door? Why didn’t I call her back? Why do I never call her back?
My hands were tight on the steering wheel.
I caught my reflection in the rearview and I didn’t even look like me. I looked like a person who was working really hard at being a person.
The light turned green. I went.
That’s all.
Why am I writing this down? I don’t know. Maybe because I read somewhere that red lights trigger the brain’s default mode network, the part that lights up when you’re not doing anything — basically the same circuit that runs when you’re meditating. I looked it up at 1 AM last night on the couch with the dog asleep on my feet, and apparently the DMN is also called the “resting state” but it’s actually doing a lot. It’s where memory consolidation happens. Self-referential thought. Future planning. The whole inner narrator thing.
So when I’m sitting at a red light, I’m not just sitting. I’m being forced into the most honest version of myself. No scroll. No podcast. No nothing. Just me and my thoughts in a car that smells faintly like the air freshener I hung off the rearview five months ago that I’ve gotten used to.
And that’s awful sometimes. That part I don’t tell people.
I told my therapist about this in late June. She said, almost word for word, “What if the red lights are the only place you’re letting yourself feel things?”
I sat there for a long time before answering.
I said “Yeah.” I said “Probably.” I said “I hate that you might be right.”
I didn’t cry that day but I cried driving home from her office and missed three green lights because I couldn’t see through my stupid watery eyes.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you. The reflection in the side mirror isn’t the one you prepared. It’s not the photo you posted last weekend. It’s not even the face you’d describe if someone asked you what you look like. It’s the face you have right now, in this weather, in this light, with whatever’s been going on inside you leaking out through your skin whether you want it to or not.
I keep noticing it. Red light, glance, flinch. Red light, glance, flinch.
I think I’ve been doing it more in the last two months than I did in the whole year before.
I think I’m doing it because there’s more to see.
That’s not a brag. That’s not a humble thing. That’s just — I guess I had something on my face I haven’t been letting myself acknowledge. The pimple I squeezed in the morning. The dark circles I tried to cover with the wrong shade of concealer. The way my mouth goes when I’m about to be sad and haven’t admitted it yet.
Red lights don’t lie. They hold the mirror still. They make you look.
I keep thinking about that quote, I think it was Joan Didion, about how we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I read that at 22 and felt smart. I read it again at 34 and felt sick. Because the story I was telling myself about being fine was making me less fine. And the only place I couldn’t keep telling it was sitting at a red light, looking up, and seeing the actual face of the person I was the whole time.
There’s this one light near my apartment, on the corner of Damen and Lawrence, that stays red for what feels like ninety seconds every single cycle. I used to dread it. Now I kind of look forward to it, which is embarrassing to admit but here we are.
Last Sunday I was sitting there. 5:48 PM. I’d just come from my cousin’s baby shower where I cried in the bathroom for no reason, washed my face, came back out, pretended nothing happened, ate two cupcakes I didn’t taste, said goodbye to everyone, walked to my car, got in.
The light turned red right before I got there. Like the universe is in on it.
I sat. I checked the mirror. There it was again. That face.
This time it looked tired in a way I didn’t hate. Tired like someone who is actually in there, not performing. Tired like someone who had an actual day. The mascara was mostly gone. There was a small line between my eyebrows I hadn’t noticed before. My lips were pressed together, not in a smile or a frown, just… settled.
It was the most honest I’d seen myself in months.
The light turned green. I drove the four blocks home. Pulled into the alley behind my building because the garage spot was taken by a car I didn’t recognize. Sat there with the engine off and my phone in my lap and didn’t open anything.
I just breathed for a while. I don’t know how long.
When I finally went inside, I didn’t check my email first. I didn’t put my bag down and start unloading. I went into the bathroom and looked at my actual face, no mirror-at-60-mph, just me at the sink, and I didn’t do anything to it.
That felt like something.
I’m not going to end this with some clean thing about how red lights are gifts or how I learned to love the pause. I haven’t learned to love the pause. I still flinch when I look up and see myself. I still sometimes take the long way to avoid that Damen light when I’m not ready.
But I see myself now. That’s different from a year ago when I was just driving through.
That’s all I got. Red lights are a mirror. I don’t know what else to call it.