Unreal

I was eating a (very) late dinner at Wendy's a while ago and lost track of time while reading an engaging short story by Stephen King about a man who finds a growing finger crawling around his bathroom sink. It was maybe a little past midnight when I stepped out of the restaurant and made my way to the building I stay in, and I immediately noticed that something wasn't right. The entire street ahead of me was empty and silent. No vehicles parked or moving down the road, no people, nothing except a dark lump huddled next to a building near the next street corner, whom I recognized as the urchin who regularly occupied that area at night. I had to turn the corner to get to my destination. I wasn't afraid of the sleeping figure - he wasn't a threat. But I was creeped out majorly by the sight of Taft avenue completely deserted. The same Taft avenue that I negotiated daily with distaste because of all the obstacles, human or otherwise, along the way. I had repeatedly found myself wishing that everything around me would disappear. And now it had. And I realized that had this happened during the day, the situation would have been more eerie. I knew that traffic thinned out along Taft at night, because most of the vehicles that pass carry commuters who work during the day, but I had never considered that it could actually become nonexistent, even for just a few moments.

In those strange few seconds as I took in my surroundings, with the yellow sodium lights casting a dim but warm glow around everything, I actually felt a sense of freedom that I never feel when I walk the streets. When I'm in any public area, and especially when I am alone, I am always on guard, and I never allow myself to completely relax. Especially when I'm on Taft avenue, a street which, I have often reflected, is a perfect testament to that bastard of a president it was named after. (You may recall that W.H. Taft was that moron who said that God had told him it was the Americans' duty to civilize their 'little brown brothers'.) So I let myself loose, and I found myself running until I reached the corner to the other street where I saw people sitting around the sidewalk doing nothing. And then the experience ended, and I stopped running and walked like a sane person the rest of the way.