by Gisela Romero
Colonial Drive crosses the city of Orlando and leaves it to go from coast to coast. It is a large avenue that observes buildings, businesses, abundance, people in motion, and the loneliness of unpopulated places open to a not-yet-polluted sky by the day-to-day madness of growing places.
Colonial Drive runs from west to east, or vice versa, until you reach the sea. If this avenue opened its arms, it would touch the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other side and would encompass many shades of blue and many multicolored sunrises and sunsets.
This segment of Colonial Drive that I am covering in this text is in the east, on the way to Titusville.
I found an empty supermarket, it is strange to see a building that at some point fed people, completely closed, maybe at night the shelves are hugged so they don’t get cold, or they are organizing a protest to be filled with food again. On the left side of the road, what was a gas station is now a solitary structure, cars come and go, and she greets them from the emptiness of her skeleton. An aged roof appeared, once it covered auto parts of used cars whose sign still retains its height and dignity: “All FOREIGN used auto parts and DOMESTIC,” the roof falls on bushes that emerge from the bricks of the resisting walls that don´t want to die.
That area of Colonial Drive has many junk yards, large areas of land belonging to pieces of cars that were once used to transport people or various things. Some cars are on the pavement, others on double decks, as if they are announcing a flight. Suddenly, a plane, half of a plane, there, living in itself, as if it had made an emergency landing between one coast to the other, lost.
And finally, lots of plaster figures, in a row, waiting for someone to take them home. Some crowded together, others organized by size, others facing the road, looking at each person passing by with their car at 70 miles per hour. Biblical characters, other mythological characters, dolphins, lions, fountains, eagles with outstretched wings, soldiers, giraffes, totems, dancers, columns, and rabbits, all in a stark gray garden, under the intense Florida sun, at three o’clock in a hot afternoon.