EXHIBITION ESSAY
Roadkill
A solo exhibition by Silas Oo
9 May — 7 June 2026
Lost Highway
Ellen Lee
In the summer after I returned from my studies abroad, I thought about dying, constantly. Not about suicide, but about dying. Everything seemed so harsh, like an invitation to some disaster. It was around this time that I also picked up driving lessons again, after having failed a test when I was 16; the matter brought me great distress, because I hated the attitudes of the instructors and testers who treated the entire thing as a given and anyone who couldn’t do it a fool (then why, one might ask them, are you here, arbitrating these foolish things?), and I kept imagining my car ramming into things. At a traffic light of an intersection, with the hand brake up, I imagined that something might happen—that perhaps for some reason I hadn’t braked properly, and when the light turned green and I put my foot on the accelerator, my car might ram headfirst into the traffic light pole in front of me and there’d be a crunch. Or, while merging, I imagined that I’d overdo it and slip into a fantastic explosion with some speeding motorcyclist against the concrete median.
There was so much tension in that time, tension between me and the machine, between the red and green lights, between where I was and where I had to go. It was time to grow up, be an adult. It’s so easy, everyone does it. Your parents did it. Your driving instructor did it. These people all around you every day did it, are doing it, so what makes you so special.
The sun tore everything up. In its light it was impossible to do anything, to go anywhere without air-conditioning. The sun splintered the city into shards which shattered across the buildings, across parking lots and stabbed you in the eye. It forced everyone to squint and sweat to pool at their necks. Sitting in the dusty compounds of driving schools, waiting for my turn to go and do the circuit all over again, sitting at the top of a small hill and waiting for the go sign and hoping I wouldn’t slide backwards. The sun was an eye that stared you down, that accused you and goaded you to retreat back into darkness.
It was imperative to learn to drive if I wanted to get anywhere at all, though it wasn’t as if I had anywhere to be. But the obverse, of staying at home without knowing how long that would go on for, seemed worse. That seemed like it would really be the end of me.
When I failed to take to driving, I began punishing myself, I think, by going out into the sun at unreasonable hours. Right at midday, I’d decide crazily to go on a walk around the neighbourhood, or for a swim in the pool, or cycling at the park. I’d go to the park in the middle of the afternoon when everyone else was at work or escaping the heat, and I’d rent a bike and do laps around the bright empty gardens.
I’d insist on walking and taking public transport. Calling a taxi seemed like a cop-out, an admission of defeat, like I was really one of those fools who couldn’t do a basic thing so I’m just going to throw money at the problem. Part of it was also that I wanted to prove that I could be an adult even without the license, that it was all a choice and that those visions of sudden collision didn’t scare me anymore.
I tried to pretend that I liked being squashed between damp shoulders in a packed train, or waiting an hour for a delayed shuttle bus, or waiting several hours after a nine-hour workday because it was pouring and I couldn’t walk to the train station, then tumbling out when it was already dark into a decrepit or lonely station with bins overflowing. I pretended that I was fine with all this because if it was good enough for everyone else, then it was good enough for me, and what made me so special.
Walking the city, pretending to know what I was doing, you’d see all kinds of things. Pigeons and rats smeared across the tarmac, like a spilled smoothie or squashed tomatoes. You’d see these fat grey rats running out of narrow alleyways that were pockmarked with puddles of brown water. I was not having collision nightmares anymore. You’d see homeless guys walking around holding an IV bag of amber fluid with a cord attached that ran under their tattered shirts. I was not afraid. You’d see sores on their bodies and I was the last one at the dimly lit train station because I couldn’t find anyone to drive me the rest of the un-walkable 2 kilometres home. I absolutely knew what I was doing, I could merge if I wanted to, I would not slam up against the concrete. In the steaming heat roadkill would stain the pavement for weeks.
The cars of strangers were not always comfortable and I’d still feel a prickly nervousness every time an ambling lorry or loaded tourbus got too close. The music was often bad if not replaced by silence—a disconcerting phenomenon that became common in the past 5 years or so, where you’d enter the backseat of a taxi with a total stranger at the wheel and just spend the entire drive in total silence—I wanted to hear the music of my parents’ radio. But my father had sold his green Honda CR-V years ago and he wasn’t living in the same place anymore. I had just come home, but everything had already fallen apart.
Anyway, they locked the city down not too long after. Two years into my return, with the sun and the evening rains and the rats and the overflowing bins, there was an international alert that a mysterious disease had broken out and was infecting everyone around the world. People were barricading themselves up in their houses and dropping dead like flies. I was afraid of merging most of all, because everyone seemed to be going so fast. They all had somewhere to be, but I felt that all the places where I had to be were just places I made up to get out of the house. But then everyone stopped leaving their houses out of fear of this invisible force that could kill you anytime if you were unlucky. So what made me so special.
Every time I thought I was settling in and that I wasn’t afraid of collisions anymore, something would happen that would make me swerve out of the lane. Like the opening chords of Hotel California coming on some midnight radio while I was in one of the rare cabs that still played the radio, driven by a stranger speeding down an empty highway to send me home after a party at someone’s house or a show on the other side of town. The nights during lockdown were the loneliest of all. Last thing I remember I was running for the door, I had to find the passage back to the place I was before. The sun kept signalling to retreat, but I kept punishing myself by walking out in midday because I did not want to encase myself, it was hard enough as it is, and every time I had felt safe and settled in the past, that bubble would pop and I’d be left wandering the city on my own again, with a strange and brutal aimlessness, staring down death and dirt and the sun, rivers of melting garbage and shouting matches in garbled languages.
I couldn’t take it anymore, seeing the end in all things, seeing the wall in the middle of the open road. I had no idea where everyone was so desperate to go, and if it was so urgent to get there, then why the city authorities didn’t do a better job of making it easier for people who couldn’t drive to get there. Equally, if it was so urgent, and if driving was such an obvious thing that everyone knew how to do, then why did they give it all up so easily in the summer of 2019. I keep saying I don’t understand, but I did really.
WRITER BIO
Ellen Lee has been assisting in exhibitions and operations at The Back Room since 2021.