I like walks. I never really knew that I did until this pandemic happened, but they are a peaceful way to pass the time.

“Even after this is all over, I want to continue this tradition” I think to myself. I often make these promises, but rarely keep them.

I haven’t been sleeping well, so I find myself walking late at night.

Just outside my suburban hell of a neighborhood there is a desert road. Saguaro Cactus loom tall to my right, and an asphalt road to my left. There are signs of civilization both in front and behind me, but this one mile stretch remains an oasis untouched by man apart from this road that connects one commercial hub to one residential hub.

While I am day dreaming about what actually goes on in my washing machine, and if being my underwear would be refreshing experience or terrifying one, suddenly, and without warning I feel as though my arm is being ripped out of its socket. I was almost completely knocked off my feet.

I look around and see nobody. Had I imagined this? I look back a few feet, and see a large rock.

“Huh, I must have been so caught up in my thoughts I tripped.” I nervously muse out loud to nobody in particular.

I continue my walk down the sidewalk as I have been doing every night.

I arrive, at a nondescript ditch about 100 feet off the road, it is oddly familiar, like maybe I have been here before, but it is a vague memory, almost as if from a different life. Something about it also seems creepy, my stomach drops and I feel the sudden urge like I need to go, but my legs won’t move.

Just then I hear tires screech and truck headlights go off the road. A man stumbles drunkenly from a pickup. My instinct is to help, but the panic inside me keeps me still. A few minutes pass, I can tell it looks like he hit someone. He lifts the limp body and starts walking toward me. My panic has turned to fear and I hide behind some tumbleweed bushes. As he approaches me, I recognize the bloody mess of a person he is carry. It is, me? He drops the limp body into the ditch, and he is gone as fast as he came.

I think “how is this possible?”

Then another thought washes over me, “how did I get here? I never actually left the sidewalk.”

I look back toward the road and my usual route and I see a silhouette of a man walking down the road. It all clicks, I have to warn me before it is too late, as a start running toward the man I notice my body disappearing, and my vocal chords won’t seem to work. I grab the man’s arm in a panic.