Rubber and Ruin

I remember the day I was installed on this huge white truck. The garage employee unscrewed my valves, allowing the bead breaker to detach me from the rim. Then, a stem core was installed. Once balanced, I was fitted snugly onto the truck’s chassis. The fit was so tight, and the scent of my fresh rubber made everything feel new and exciting.

But that day feels like a distant memory now. Back then, I often wondered what purpose this truck served. That was before I developed the sense of hearing. I had always felt the weight of the loads it carried, sometimes so heavy that I feared I might burst into tiny rubber pieces.

The most frightening experience I’ve ever had was the day my truck drove through a field of debris. At first, I couldn’t understand what was happening. The air was heavy with smoke, carrying a strange, sharp smell. Even through my tough rubber skin, I could feel the heat radiating from outside. Panic set in, was my truck on fire?

Then, for the first time, I heard something. A vibration, unlike anything I had ever felt from my truck, pulsed through me. It was followed by a loud unsettling echo. At that moment, I realized these sounds weren’t just mechanical vibrations. They were something entirely different.

They were the cries of humans. They did not have a rhythm to them, they were filled with sobs and gasps, they rose and fell unpredictably. Sometimes they were soft and sometimes they were not. It reminded me of the way air rushed into the other tires back in the garage when they were being inflated.

I had always thought my purpose was to carry weight, to endure heft, but in that moment, I realized I was rolling through something far heavier than cargo. The voices that filled the air, pressed me in a way no load ever had.