Colliding Spheres
I was traveling when the car I was riding in stopped. I continued on foot. I can't remember exactly where I was going but I seemed to be heading to a house of someone I knew.
While I was walking I passed this strange person who appeared to be two extremely different people but was just one person. It unnerved me. I found myself at this Shell station, one that had a Taco Bell inside it. There were some people inside doing some work but so absently as if they weren't even there. I could see them out of the corner of my eye and I could hear them but when I looked straight at them, they were gone. I had the strangest impression that the place was merely echoing some memory of their presence.
Outside the windows I could see the distant comet light in the sky. I wondered what I was doing in that place and if it was closed, but everything seemed to be open and operating. I left. Further on I was standing by some gasoline pumps and this place seemed to be a Texaco. There was a man working inside. He looked very friendly. He was smiling and seemed very kind. As I looked back at the gas pumps I saw all the numbers go crazy and they were turning so fast that all I could see was a blur of red flashing digits. I walked towards the door and noticed a lady inside talking with the man inside. The man was suddenly quiet. The lady was asking for directions when he grabbed her and told me to get out of there or I'd be killed. He grabbed a gun and was locking himself and the lady inside the station with him. No one else was around so no one but me saw this happen. I left.
I knew there was nothing I could do because everything outside was abandoned. It wasn't of fear of the man who threatened me, it was that I wasn't really there to begin with. I couldn't change this outcome. The man was like the person I saw from before - he changed with the snap of a finger, he even seemed to be a little different in appearance and size.
I was now traveling down a strange, but all too familiar road. I had navigated this one before. All around there were green rolling hills, and set in shadow with the daylight hanging luminously above like a suspended state of sunset. The sun shown like a distant lamplight, as if being filtered through a blue reflection from a glassy sky. Dark blue and fading but never like dusk. Soft yellowish and warm light rested until within a short time night fell and there was no more light. Within seconds it was all gone. The reflection was still there. The road itself narrow and twisted along the bottom of one hill and then up and over the other hills. There was a kind of pattern about the road, zig-zagging in giant L shapes. Always headed either away from the sunset or towards it.
I continued to see what lay over the next hill, to unravel the mystery. The sunset that never sinks behind the hills except in the moment when one is no longer on that stretch of road. I saw a dead land all around me. Tumbleweed was strewn about although this was no desert. I looked up to the now heavy sky and saw globes of natural bright colors. The surfaces of them bulged here and there, heading in succession towards the earth. They were moving slowly and they appeared solid. Crashing into the ground as if they were filled with vapor. I could hear the thud of the crashes but when I looked, all that seemed to happen was that they kicked up a puff of smoke upon impact. These spheres were ominous yet they seemed merely to be dead weight.
Again the hour is late. I go fetch myself a hot drink. It's not like true rest and sleep sometimes. It's like going from one task to another.
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