We are staying in an AirBNB in downtown Toronto with my mom. It’s a small 3-bedroom apartment on the 6th floor, just above the Gardener Expressway. I needed earplugs to go to sleep last night. The flow of traffic is a little too uneven to be a constant background noise.

I remember a funny line from Robin Williams as Mork, playing an alien from another planet, on the sitcom Mork & Mindy. He comes in one day and asks Mindy, “Why do they call it ‘rush hour’ when nothing moves?”

Any city as big as Toronto has a buzz, and never sleeps. The highway below us has a constant, congested flow of traffic and as I write this at almost 5:30pm the traffic is crawling going both east and west. But even at 2am there will be a flow of traffic. I don’t think there is a time during the day when there would be no cars on the small strip of road outside this apartment’s window.

Sometimes when I’m on the road at 2am I wonder as I drive, “Where are all these other cars going?” And, “Where are they coming from?”

How are so many other people on the road right now? Is this a regular routine or an unusual anomaly in their travel patterns? Are they coming home from a long day? A fun night? Or are they just starting their day?

Tonight I’ll put my earplugs in and ignore the traffic flow, cars each heading to their own destinations… destinations I’ll never know.