Potholes don't vanish when nobody votes

I am tired of driving my own street like it is a video game I never agreed to play. The potholes keep multiplying, and every morning I do that little dance around them like that is just how life works now. It is not a grand conspiracy. It is the slow insult of being ignored until somebody needs a photo in front of a freshly patched patch of pavement.

I know the rhythm by now. For most of the year the road is a suggestion. Then election season arrives and suddenly everyone remembers that streets exist. I am not asking for a parade. I am asking not to feel like my daily commute is the only proof that anybody lives here.

Nobody has to invent a villain for this. The feeling is simple: if you stay quiet and stay home, the crater in front of your house becomes background noise. People who never show up get treated like people who never show up. That is not philosophy. That is how attention works.

I am not writing a dissertation on asphalt. I am writing because I am fed up with being an afterthought until the calendar says it is time to pretend otherwise. My complaint is my street and the habit of looking away from it. That is enough.

So I am going to vote. Not because a pothole whispered a platform to me. Because staying home is how you lose by default, and I am done losing the same argument with the same hole in the road. Show up. Make them remember you when it is not convenient.