I got good and loaded a couple of weeks back at The Shack playing pool and drinking whisky and made the rookie error of giving my card to the barman so he’d open a tab for me.
Suffice to say, I staggered home on foot (we live about 5 mins from The Shack) without it, which meant I had to mission back there the following night to pick it up.
It was one of those windy nights in CT where it feels like you’re living in a hurricane, and I was driving along McKenzie street, right by Wembley Square when I saw her.
She had auburn hair and was wearing a grey cardigan and jeans, I guessed she was in her twenties. She was walking down the road, in the middle of the right lane, basically right outside Wembley Square, maybe 30 metres from my car.
The moment I saw her, something caught my attention to my left, a packet or something being whipped around by the wind. Whatever it was, it diverted my attention for maybe half a second while I was driving, and then I looked back to where the girl was.
And she was gone. I’d seen her clear as day, right there in the road walking ahead of me, so real I could touch her and then half a second later, it was like she had never existed.
At first I thought nothing of it and just carried on driving, but my mind refused to let it go. It was like I was crunching an equation that just wasn’t adding up and instead of forgetting about it, that image of her in the road started looping over and over in my head.
She couldn’t have just ducked off behind a car or something, no one can move that fast, it’s just not humanly possible.
I was halfway to the Engen on Orange when something else about the whole experience struck me that started making my skin crawl.
There was a gale force wind blowing outside and she though she was walking in it, her hair and her clothes didn’t move at all. She wasn’t even bracing herself against the wind, she was just walking down the street like it was a perfectly calm, still evening.
I drove back home with this hollow, anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach and literally sprinted up into the flat to get the hell out of the dark.
It’s the first time I’ve ever experienced anything like that and it still gives me the creeps when I think back on that girl.
What if she’d turned around? What if I’d seen her face?
Anyway. Bit of a fucked up story to tell all you crazy kids right before the weekend. Not really sure why I decided to tell it today of all days except I saw this picture a few minutes ago and it got me thinking of the whole thing all over again.
So yeah. Have a killer weekend?
-ST
