The road unwound ahead of her. Or was being unwound, she decided. She was walking forward at a pretty good clip, she thought, and the more she saw of the road the more it seemed at the mercy of some unseen specter. Up ahead and out of sight and enormous, she was sure, it held a coil of road slack in one hand and with the other was carefully snaking an asphalt ribbon through the trees.

But was she walking forward? She tried to think. It occurred to her that not only was she unable to name the place she found herself in but that she had no memory of having set out. Inside her pockets her palms felt slick. She took them out, passing them over the sides of her coat, and tilted her face toward the sky. For one terrifying moment her skin yielded to night and there was nothing to keep the stars from the vacuum in her center. Then a pair of eyes looked at her, twin globes suspended in black. She blinked, and the eyes grew larger. Headlights. The word came to her from far away, and meanwhile the headlights drew nearer. Soon they were accompanied by the low growl of an engine. What felt like a very long time passed as she tried to decide not what to do, whether to hide, whether to run, but: Was she approaching the headlights or were the headlights approaching her? These words - "headlights," "engine," even "trees" and "road" - where were they coming from? She was sure of them, and yet could not imagine their meaning in terms of herself. She could not, in fact, associate any kind of meaning to herself and as she moved further down the road she could barely believe in the gravel moving under her feet. It felt unreal that she should effect any change, when she herself was without definition. There was nothing to know beyond her existence on this road, beneath the watchful trees and a cosmos vast and indifferent. And what of the specter in all this?

She watched the lights slow and turn away from her, then dim. She was past the place where the lights went out before she heard several slams followed by quiet voices. Perhaps she wouldn't have turned; perhaps she would have kept following the specter, would have kept believing that the path it laid was meant for her. In pursuit of nameless, infinite others, she might have walked forever.

[Also I am aware that I wrote 'chardonnay' instead of 'champagne' in my last post, and I just want to be clear that I was not drunk when I wrote that. I was high. On cough syrup. But I am better now, thank you for asking. You're very thoughtful.]