There was the sound of a car coming down the road, so I turned to try and flag it down. The headlights washed over me and I began waving my arms frantically and yelling for them to stop, but I was ignored and they continued on past me into the darkness. With a sigh I looked back towards the events that were happening above me, but to my surprise the stars had all resumed their normal positions and it was as if all that I had seen never occurred. Feeling very confused, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. After feeling the sharp pain and nothing changed, I resigned myself to the fact that I must have imagined it and continued on my path. After walking for what seemed like ages, I began to see some light up ahead down the road. I let out a slight cry of joy and began to quicken my pace toward the lights.
It was an odd sensation, however, because I felt that no matter how fast I walked the lights remained the same distance away, as if I was walking backwards on a moving sidewalk one sees in an airport. Becoming more and more frustrated, I began to run toward the light, but the lights didn’t move. To my left and right I could see the scenery changing, so that I knew I must be moving (and in a forward direction because the landmarks on either side of me were moving behind me). I began to push myself harder and began running faster, but somehow I didn’t lose my breath and my legs never felt any more tired. The hills and plateaus out in the distance moved faster and faster away from me, until I could no longer recognize their shapes and everything turned into a blur. I focused ahead of me on those lights, which were just out my reach, and they still remained the same distance away.
I was moving so fast now that everything turned dark around me and I couldn’t see anything except the lights that were ahead of me. Finally, I realized that I was never going to make it to the lights in this way. I was moving at the speed of light (at the time it did not even occur to me how absurd this idea was) and everything around me had disappeared because the light could not reach me, but because I was traveling in the path of the light from those lights I was chasing, I could still see them. Whatever those lights were being emitted from was moving away from me at the same speed I was travelling. So I stopped running and began to feel a sense of hopelessness. How was I ever to catch up?
Something then creeped into my mind that I had learned once, and that was that the speed of light is a universal speed limit and nothing could break it. I began to think about what I could do if I couldn’t break that limit, and then I realized that I could just be there. The power of thought could be my transport to those lights, my thoughts existing outside of space and outside of time, and therefore not succumbing to the limiting laws of physics. We are limited in that we make such laws for ourselves, if we would only let our minds be free of such rigid structure we might see that the things we think are impossible, actually are possible. Our world is limited only by our mind, and our mind is limited by our rational element that dominates our imagination. In this world anything is possible, but we must allow our imagination to lead the revolution and take over our mind. All this went through my mind as I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, when I opened my eyes again I was in the middle of the parking lot of the diner I had eaten at not that long ago.
The bright lights hurt my eyes because they had become so adjusted to the darkness in which had been moving for so long. Inside, I saw the tired waitress standing behind the counter filling up another cup of coffee for the truck driver who was harmlessly flirting with her. “Come on, I’ve got a big ol’ sleeper. You can come ride with me to Beaufort. It’ll be fun, and I swear I’ll be nice,” he smiled with a wide grin and innocent eyes at the waitress. She just shook her head, and gave him only the slightest hint of returning smile, but this was the most she could muster. He shrugged and then continued to drink his coffee. Around the corner of the building I found a pay phone and tried to make a call to triple A, but when I picked up the receiver all I heard was silence. I hung it up, and then tried again, still I heard nothing; so I made my way inside to see if they had a phone I could use inside.
When I walked inside I tried to get the waitress’ attention, but she seemed to look right through me and stare off at something far off in the distance behind me. The look she had struck me as odd because it wasn’t as if she was simply glazed over, but really seemed to not even recognize that I was there. “Excuse me,” I said and waved my hand slightly to try and break her concentration. The only reaction she gave was that she began to wipe down the counters, so I tried again several times and received the same result. Frustrated, I walked back outside to gather myself before I made another attempt. As I paced outside the man who had been flirting with the waitress came out and made his way toward his truck, then it struck me. Even if I am able to call and have my car towed somewhere, there is no way I could have it repaired, it was totaled, and I was being driven on this mission, of sorts, by some unseen force that I could not ignore. The truck driver’s words stuck out in my mind because he had said he was going to Beaufort, which was on the coast and could be my venue to set out and find the girl in the photograph.
I chased after the truck driver trying to get his attention as he was getting into his truck, and just as if he could read my mind, the passenger door opened and I was let into his truck. I climbed up onto the seat and thanked him profusely for letting me in. He didn’t respond, but seemed to nod in acknowledgement. He then let out a loud whistle, and just as I was about to shut the door, I heard a bark right next to me. A dog came springing out of the darkness, jumped in over me and climbed back behind the front seats in the cab. After some sniffing about his head reappeared between the seats and the truck driver scratched behind the dog’s ears and said, “let’s get back on the road. We should make it by sunrise, so you get some sleep.” I said thanks and as the engine started I sank back into the seat and fell asleep.
It was strange that I fell asleep so quickly because I seemed to have been spending most of the night sleeping with my late start going to work and being knocked unconscious after the accident; however, I hadn’t slept much the day before, and with all the trauma, I believe it was to be expected. There didn’t seem to be any transition into the dream-state as I continued to perceive everything happening around me. The lights of the truck flipped on and illuminated the parking lot, and soon enough we were driving down the road. Everything around the truck had become dark. The stars seemed to have been blotted out of the sky by some great ink well that had been spilled over the entire canvas.
All the shadows of the hills on either side of the highway disappeared, and the only thing that was visible we the narrow corridor of light in front of the truck. The driver seemed to be in his own world and concentrating on the road, so I didn’t want to talk to him and break his focus. As I stared ahead into what I could see from the glow of the headlights I began to notice the column of light becoming shorter. Like we were driving into an dark fog, the lights had less and less of an effect on the darkness around us, but the driver didn’t seem to take any notice of this. The truck also seemed to be accelerating, not as if the driver was trying to make it go faster, but as if we were being pulled forward by some tremendous force. I sat up in alarm as I felt the truck go faster and faster, and watched the lights get closer and closer to the truck until they almost faded completely and left us in complete darkness. “Do you see that?” I cried out, but the driver maintained his composure, as if nothing was happening. I wanted to shake him loose from his spell and yell at him, but I realized that that would not accomplish anything and it might even insult him. He was a professional driver after all and judging by his reaction, he must have encountered situations like this before, or he was asleep at the wheel.
Finally the light completely faded and suddenly a strange thing happened. The terrible pulling sensation I had been feeling grow stronger by the second ceased completely. Furthermore, I no longer even felt the vibrations from the wheels on the ground or the hum of the engine. I was now all alone in a dark void with no signs of anything around me, and it occurred to me that I could not feel the chair beneath me anymore and when I reached out I couldn’t feel the interior of the truck around me. Somehow I had been taken out of everything and been put into nothing, into vast emptiness, if it can be called vast. When there is nothing, it cannot be really described because to describe it would be say that there is something to describe. The emptiness wasn’t just a feeling of being surrounded, but it was feeling that fully consumed me. My entire being felt empty, it wasn’t lonesome because there wasn’t anything to be longing for, but it was painful nonetheless. Painful might not be the proper word either because pain insinuates a cause, this was a feeling that cannot properly be put into words.
Imagine being drained of everything that makes one human; all emotions, passions, longings, just everything, and all that is left are thoughts, empty analytic thoughts. Here there was no time and no space, so there was no reference for description, and I cannot say how long I was there, but I would have spent a million lifetimes in the most horrible prison on Earth than to have remained there. In the darkness there came a light, small at first, but growing in intensity. As the light began to grow brighter and seemed to come closer, I began to feel again. A warmth began coursing through my veins comforting me. The light began to take on a recognizable shape as it came closer; it was the shape of a woman daintily walking toward me, swinging one foot in front of the other. She began to speak soft words to me that made me shudder from pure adoration, “Pas encore amour. Tu as besoin de réveiller!” When she said this last line the light she exuded become so bright that it burned my eyes and I was forced to shut them. When I opened my eyes again I was back in the truck and we were pulling in to a gas station, and the sun was rising on the horizon.
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