This happened to me a few years ago. I wont get into the gory details of my personal situation but I’ll just leave it at this- this happened at one of the lowest points of my life. An all time rock bottom. physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially - I was completely bottomed out.
This particular night I remember working late. I was the last one in the store and I peeled myself off the shabby leather chair in the back office and began locking up. I had that feeling. you know the one, the one where you feel like nothing around you is real? The feeling where you feel like the world just seems different, like you’re trapped in an alternate reality. Or like you’re somewhere you shouldn’t be. I remember the first time I can recall having this feeling was when my mom was in the hospital. I remember as a kid running up and down the mostly empty halls in the late hours, this usually busy hallway now dark and cavernous. I digress.
It was one of those nights. I hauled my own turgid corpse out of the store front. to my car in the parking lot. I stared up at the starless black sky. The world felt tiny, like I could outrun its borders. I got in my car a decided to drive out to stargaze, and partake in certain vices. I didn’t pass a single other driver on the way. I drove way out on the highway, pulling off into a nonspecific grassy ditch. I lay on the highway median staring up at the black sky. At this moment it didn’t appear as an infinite expanse but rather a sort of barricade. Like i was staring up at the lid of shoebox we all lived inside.
I stared blankly in a sort of dumbfounded frustration when i saw it, a sort of snaking flash. It looked like a shooting star. I jumped up thinking maybe it was the headlight of some cop, pulling over to give me the business. But instead I saw something else. It looked like a tall thin string of light. Like tinsel waving in wind. It moved wildly twirling around and curving. It reminded me of arcing electricity. A little lightning bolt frozen about a hundred feet away from me.
I couldn’t focus my eyes on it. My ears were ringing but beyond that I could hear something at the edge of earshot, a sort of hissing. Not aggressive like a snake but somewhere between a tea kettle and a gentle whisper. I walked towards it. As O got closer it dissolved from my vision leaving a blurry dark spot. But it didn’t stay gone. Deeper in the trees I saw two of them. Dancing in place like before. Blinding silver streamers hiding behind the trees. I walked deeper into the woods trying to get closer.
The hissing siren call was deafening. I could now smell them. They smelled like rain, or that smell before a big storm. I shed my shoes and felt the rough ground beneath my feet. There were so many of them. Pushing through the dense brush I felt the shirt tear from my back. they were so close. I could feel them, cold as ice but moving so wildly. It was like touching TV static. I reached a fence and it seemed to fall away. I didn’t notice the cuts and scrapes all over my body either.
On the other side of the fence there was a clearing. I walked, carried by this force. Pushed by it. I felt deja vu. An intense deja vu, a feeling that I recognized this place. Though I had never been. I walked over to the stony edge before me. surrounded by pulsing white lights, a dozen of them now.
I looked over the edge of the cliff into the gorge below, and in the inky darkness I could see something lying at the bottom, multiple things. I squinted at it, trying to discern the familiar mass of items at the bottom. the sense of deja vu crescendoed as I focused enough to decipher a white cross and dried wreaths of flowers atop the pile. As I recognized this place from the news the pulling force of the lights had never been stronger. it was like holding the weight of a car over the edge. I tried to dig my feet in but lifting them just made them nudge forward gently. I was staring deep into the quarry. Where all those people jumped. surrounded, beckoned, by all those silver lights.
After a moment I felt myself lean back and fall hard on the stony ground behind me, scrambling backwards before I could catch my breath. I left. I never said a word to anyone. But sometimes when I really focus I can still hear that hissing. Especially when I’m alone at night.