The Gas Station

It’s 6:25 AM, your alarm clock shrieks from the nightstand. Your house is dimly lit with the golden rays of dawn. Summer has been over for a month or two and it already feels so far away. Your bed beckons, promising warmth, an eternal summer tucked neatly between mattress and bedspread. Your feet hit the cold wood floor, and it creaks ever so slightly. You grab clothes and you hurriedly get dressed. The bus will be here soon.

Outside the world is filled in with fog, a thick blanket smothering everything. You can barely make out the shapes of your neighbor’s houses through it. Pulling your jacket tight you race down the sidewalk to the bus stop. Your head is filled with a prickly feeling, like the way it feels when you roll around in the grass, a little itch on the inside. There are a few other kids there, and you just huddle quietly together. You can hear the bus down the street, even if you can’t see it yet, the groaning and whooshing of the engine, and soon it’s barreling through the fog, always a little too fast. The doors pop open.

As you watch the world slide by, the familiar houses seems to smudge together, everything is like a melted ice cream soup. Everything inside you is muddy, like a field after the rain, and it doesn’t quite feel real. Like your body is moving but your brain is behind it. A little to the left. A feeling like you never left the warm embrace of your comforter, or walked down the sidewalk. A strange, pervading sensation that none of this is real. The the bus groans to a halt behind the school and you get out and go to class.

By lunch you’ve forgotten that you ever felt strange, it’s not until you are laying in your bed once again after yet another day that you think about how you felt on the bus. That numbness, the vagueness of your limbs as if you were a cloud of fog yourself loosely fixed in a human shape. Suddenly plagued with all these questions gnawing at your mind, the loudest: What does it mean to be alive?

No one ever explained it to you, you just keep waking up over and over, a little older every day, summer turns into fall and you go back to school and then it’s winter break and you’re free from the cycle for a second and you’re happy, but why? Everything feels so important, but so fake. Your entire life depends on the choices you make, but you don’t even know what it means to live. The world around you is so complex, and you are learning more about it, but everything you learn opens another door into what feels like an ever expanding spiral. There are so many books you haven’t read, movies you haven’t seen, and everything is tugging at you with invisible strings until it feels once again like your body is fading away, and you fall asleep.

6:25 AM, your alarm clock shrieks from the nightstand. Your house is dimly lit with the golden rays of dawn. Your clothes are in a pile on the floor, and the hardwood floors are cold against your bare feet. You get dressed quickly, the bus will be here soon. But you aren’t going. You put on jeans and boots and grab a hoodie out of your closet. Shoving your backpack deep under the bed you run out the front door. Racing down the sidewalk, not towards the bus, but in the opposite direction.

There’s a trail through the woods that leads down to the river. The fog is extremely thick, rolling off the water like smoke, there’s a few deer by the bank but they scatter as you approach. The river bank is soft and muddy, you step carefully so your feet down get trapped in the muck. Your heart is beating for some reason. Just being here makes you feel alive. You can see the sun glowing a deep orange through the clouds and trees. You run along the river and up under a bridge, huge chunks of stone are there and you have to climb over them to get through.

Up on top of the bridge now and you have to watch for cars coming as you walk down the street. The sun is higher now, and the wind is a little warmer. The fog begins to clear. You can see half the town from up here, all the little streets weaving in and out between the houses. Tiny cars driving around. You can see your house, the window to your bedroom; a black speck. Everything you’ve ever known feels so small from here, like it could blow away just like the fog and nothing would be left but trees and grass.

The road takes you higher up into the hills. The trees are bigger here, trees with needles instead of leaves. You wonder what it would be like to live in the woods, to never go back home. You could sleep up in a tree, and play in the woods all day. That could be fun. The pine needles crunch under your feet and poke themselves through your socks. You’ve come this way before in the car with your mom. There’s a campground and a trailer park further up and then the road goes back down the hill towards the highway.

You are sweating now, and your shoes are starting to feel a little tight, maybe you had started growing out of them. You pull them off and knot the laces together and hang them off the back of your neck. The pine needles are soft under your feet, a little prickly but not painful. Maybe a little slippery, and as you had that thought your foot hit a loose patch and down you fell. For a moment you wondered how long it would take for someone to find your body if you died out in these woods. Maybe it was the absurdity of it all, or the fact that it didn’t even hurt but as you laid there you burst into laughter.

Sitting up, your hair full of pine needles and tears running down your cheeks, you pulled yourself up with a tree branch and continued on. The trailer park was to your left and you had thought about exploring it but after seeing it again you decided against it. They looked run down and maybe even abandoned. There were a few cars parked around but they were just as bad if not worse. Better if you just keep going. You hadn’t really put thought to where you were gonna go, more that you just had to go somewhere. Around a bend in the road you caught sight of a cinderblock building half overtaken with vegetation. There were vines blowing in the wind draped like curtains over busted out windows. What used to be automatic doors were stuck halfway shut. You easily slipped through the gap.

It looked like an abandoned gas station. There were shelves and those wall to wall coolers for drinks but they were all empty and the glass was smashed out onto the floor, just like the front windows. There were old curling and yellowed beer posters on the wall and ads for cigarettes and something called “Snus.” The cash register had been shoved to the side and there were empty bottles and snack wrappers piled up in the corners like dead leaves. The place was completely destroyed. It was all horrifically fascinating. And then you saw the foot.

It was poking out from under one of the piles of trash, an old tennis shoe. You could see the shape of a person huddled up in the corner. Very carefully you took a step closer, your heart pounding in your ears. Your stocking foot took another step, dodging debris. His face was turned away, and you had to get a little closer to take a peek. Another step. The pale skin of his face was almost completely white. His mouth was a little open, his teeth were long and his tongue was black. He had a ragged beard and his eyes…

You ran out of the gas station so quickly. Your shoes smacked against your chest as you raced down the road. You might have been screaming but it was hard to tell. You ran all the way to the bridge and then down the side and over the rocks, following the river bank until you got to the trail in the woods. Your feet and legs were covered in river mud. Your lungs were burning as you tumbled through the back door and into the kitchen where your mother was sitting at the table.

“I just got off the phone with your school. What were you thinking?” The rest of her tirade faded into noise, like the sound of a thunderstorm outside. Fury and lightning and wind. You were a tree, or a rock. You weathered the storm. In that moment you understood something. Maybe not explicitly, but an internalized knowing. Like something that was in your bones. Today you had crossed a line, stepped into another world and just for a moment you felt what it was like to be alive. That feeling was hidden inside of you like a secret. Your secrets gave you strength.

6:25 AM, your alarm clock was unplugged and sitting in the plastic trashcan beside the bed. It was Saturday, but you were awake anyway. Something was different. You kept reliving yesterday over and over. It was in your dreams. You knew that you were not the same person you were two days ago. That foggy feeling was completely gone and replaced with something else. A hollowness. A sharpness. Like your eyes could see even in the dark. You had looked into his eyes and now nothing would ever look the same again. There was a strength there, in that hollow place inside your chest. Your secret lived in there now, like a strange, cold organ that had grown overnight.

The rest of the school year passed quickly, the endless looping days and nights that slid into one another didn’t feel as monotonous. Sometimes you thought about what you saw in the gas station, when you did it was like you could feel something sitting next to you, like something made of fog and mist in the shape of a person, but only you could see it. It followed you like a shadow, like a guardian angel. Things were different now, you felt different and saw different. The way you saw others had shifted ever so slightly, they seemed more fragile now, as if a strong gust could blow them away, and everything else would go along with it, just like the fog.