I don't like to drive at night anymore.
My friend told me to put this here after hearing what happened to me, so here I go.
About 2, 3 years ago, I was on a drive through the Appalachians. I was coming from Savanna. It was just something I liked to do. The Appalachians make me feel at home, I just get this overwhelming feeling of peace and comfort whenever I visit. It’s hard to explain, but I treat them as my true home. Anyways, this particular time, the reason I was driving through them was because of work. I worked in a large defense contractors office (I’m not gonna name which for legal reasons, but it was one of the big ones.)
That particular day, I had to clean up a major fuck-up on part of one of my superiors. A document had been leaked to the public, and I had to respond for it. I was grilled by two suits from the DoD for what felt like days. At the end of it, they fired me. The last thing I did at the office was collect my things and drink some water from a pitcher in the common area. It tasted… weird. I couldn’t really place my finger on it. Regardless, I ignored it. I didn’t really have a lot of friends at the time, so I did what made sense to me and skipped town. I hopped in my car and took off.
When you drive, it feels like the entire world is moving past you, forgetting about you, like you’re entering a new existence, one where it is just you, alone. Alone with your thoughts. By the time I got to the start of the range, the sky had begun to turn that nice sunset purple. It was serene. In the afternoon, the sun is blaring, almost intrusive in everything you do. But, from the hours between five to seven, the sun feels calm, almost as if it finally gets to unwind after a long day, and it lets out those vibrant hues of red, purple and yellow. As I continued to drive, the sky got darker, and darker. After a while, it was pitch-black. I know that a lot of people might disagree with me on this, but night is actually my favorite time to drive. I just feel so isolated. Anyways, as I continued on the drive the cloud cover started to wane, and I could see the stars in the sky. They look so close together, like they’re all neighbors on a street, when in reality they are separated by millions of miles of nothingness. Isolated. What a dream.
As I continued, the cars on the road began to lessen. No more bright lights cutting through the darkness like that of a knife going through butter. It was truly me alone, isolated with my car. I lost track of time for a bit, hours could have passed and I wouldn’t have noticed. What I did notice however, was that my car was slowly but surely running out of gas.
My phone didn’t have any service, but luckily I spotted a sign on the side of the road. “Gas, 3 miles”. My car only had one mile left. Shortly after this, my phone died, which was weird because I hadn’t really been using it, but I ignored it. I decided to leave my car on the side of the road. I would go on foot to get it.
The nice thing about Appalachian roads are that some of them, especially the ones in valleys can be very straight. But, that didn’t make up for the fact I couldn’t see anything. If you’re in your car, you feel isolated and alone, but you feel safe, you don’t feel vulnerable. I hated feeling vulnerable. If you are walking in the dark, alone and isolated, you do. The thought that after I got this gas, I would be able to keep driving, driving alone, yet safe through the dark void, kept me going. The worst thing about the walk though, was the sensory deprivation. It felt as though every step I took I was gambling on whether or not I would leap out of this reality and go into the next, one where you couldn’t see or hear or feel.
After an amount of time, I finally saw the glow. The soft dim glow of what felt like a bastion of light surrounded by a moat of darkness.
The parking lot of the gas station was small, and there was only one pump. I had only brought cash with me. I grabbed the handle on the door. It was harsh metal, maybe steel. I swung the door out, and entered the shop. The inside had blaring lights, which reflected off the windows, making it feel like the shop was the only vestige of reality left in this desolate plane. I stepped forward to the front desk, which was facing what seemed like endless aisles of food and other… items.
At the desk was a man. He was maybe a few feet taller than me and had a thick beard running down his torso. I couldn’t really think of anything to say. I just handed him the cash and meekly muttered the words, “Gas, please.” He looked down at me from above. He put his hand on the cash and stuffed it behind the desk. At this moment I felt intensely vulnerable. I stared at him, this goliath of a human. He entered the door behind the counter. I was alone again, yet I didn’t feel safe. No.
This sense of panic came over me. I started to sweat. It felt like I had entered a wrong place, somewhere that I should’ve never seen. I turned around. The aisles looked like someone had stretched them out infinitely. Like they reached on forever, faded into a black point of nothingness, a singularity of isolation. I stepped towards them, even though my mind was screaming no, my body kept walking, like it was addicted. I reached out my hand toward the aisle and looked on in horror as it too started to stretch, and yet I kept walking, and soon my entire body was engulfed, and I couldn’t get out, I couldn’t leave and it was eternal, it was- the clerk tapped my shoulder.
He handed me a gas canister and pointed to the pump outside. He muttered something, but I couldn’t hear him. I looked around. My hands and body were fine. The aisles were normal, There was nothing wrong.
I walked out of the store, holding the gas canister.
The pump was alone, holding up a roof, one that provided some light for me. I held the gas can up to the pump’s hose and began to press down on the nozzle. A stream of liquid fire came out of it and entered the can with the veracity of a wave. It smelt like a highway. When the can finally filled up, I took my hand off of the nozzle and let the last few drops fall onto the emptiness of the dark. I stepped back from the pump. I began to walk into the all-encompassing darkness once again.
The darkness, like before, was debilitating. I kept my eyes forward, and continued to march. At that moment, I felt it. Total isolation, the thing that I craved. I didn’t even walk anymore. It wouldn’t have made a difference. I became transcendent. A lot of people will talk about their near-death experiences, where they see the light beckoning for them. I didn’t get that. No, what I got was something else. In that darkness, I couldn't see myself. Except, it really didn’t feel like seeing.
No, it felt like I was watching something happen from inside my head but not actually experiencing it. The darkness began to flash with, from what I can remember, like insects. Bees, ants, moths, butterflies, and I don’t even know what else. It was like viewing a projector flash individual slides at 20 times speed. I kept thinking of the same phrase: Drawn to light, like a worker good. It was all I could imagine.
The pictures kept repeating for, well, what felt like infinity. The same flashes of insects just mixed in with sheer darkness. My sense of self had completely evaporated. I no longer felt human, and really, I didn’t even feel real. It really was indescribable. I don’t remember a lot of it. It all blended together. I imagine that what I experienced might be what experiencing a lobotomy visually might feel like. The next thing I can make out, I was sitting in a field. Like one you might see in some idyllic fantasy show.
The sky was that same hue of purple, that sunset shade I mentioned. The grass was soft and easy to push through, almost like hair. Next to me was my mother. A short woman, with grey hair. She looked at me. In a calm tone, she told me, “You came to the light. Like a good worker.” I sat there. I didn’t say anything. The sky shifted into a mass of eyes, all staring down at me. It all began to flicker, with flashes of light. I suddenly regained control of my body. The daylight felt like a flashbang to my eyes.
I was standing on the edge of a cliff, maybe 40 feet high, on top of a mountain. I stumbled backwards, falling back onto the ground. I looked around. Everything seemed normal. I walked down from the mountain, which thankfully had a small trail. When I eventually got back to the road, I saw the mess. A three-car pile-up. In fact, one of the cars looked familiar. It was… mine. Firetrucks and police lined the road. One of them spotted me. He told me to step back, and that I should return to my vehicle. I was sure of it. That car was my vehicle. I stood there, dumb-founded. The cop looked at me. I explained to him that that was my vehicle.
I later found out that the other two cars were limos carrying the governor of Georgia and his family. They let me go after three days of interrogating me. There were no survivors. I am now an accountant in Boone for a tech start-up. To this day, this was the strangest and scariest experience I have ever had. I have not been able to find the gas station that I went to. In fact, when I looked at a map of where the governor died, there wasn’t a gas station in proximity for thirty miles.