text: The problem with going to dinner with Kali was always how full I am when I leave. I had needed a night out, away from the struggle of three kids and a husband, going to college a second time and navigating caring for a sick relative. She’d invited me to a high-end restaurant, her treat, but I’d had to make the drive because we lived in separate cities. Dallas was a middle point. I settled into the leather seats of my car and found my favorite playlist before entering the address of my home into my GPS. Something loud because I was full and tired. I sent a brief text to my husband to let him know that I was leaving the restaurant and the arrival time was estimated to be around ten pm. The drive should take around forty-eight minutes. I pulled out of the restaurant and almost immediately onto the exit ramp to the main byway. Dallas on a Saturday night was always hell, but tonight the traffic was lighter than usual. Maybe it was the side of town we’d met on. It was closer to the very south end, and we both lived north of the city. As I drove around the byway, I noticed that the city was very bright, but the edges of the city were very dark. Unusually dark. The whole night had a strange aura about it. I drove for a while, singing along to the music, when I suddenly noticed that the city of was on the wrong side of me. If I was heading north, the city should have been to my left, and it was to my right. I stared at it as long as it was safe outside of my window, wondering how this could have possibly happened, especially without me noticing. I checked my GPS, which had rerouted without alerting me. Come to think of it, it hadn’t spoken at all. The hairs on my neck and arms raised. I hadn’t changed direction, or even taken an exit. Everything was backwards. I didn’t feel comfortable exiting at this point, and I was trying to look at the GPS while driving 80 MPH. The next exit was well lit, and I pulled off. It was the exit I started at. My heart began to race. There was no way I could have circumvented the entirety of Dallas in the time I’d been driving. Panicked, I double checked my entry in the phone and hit start again. I got back onto the byway and began to drive. The road looked completely different even though it was the exact same route. I drove along and traffic seemed relatively normal. Soon, however, it began to back up and cars slowed, and brake lights lit up the night. Over the tops of other vehicles, I could see lights and emergency vehicles ahead of me. Traffic proceeded at a crawl for several minutes. I switched back and forth between glancing down at the GPS and looking ahead of me at was what to come. I slowly passed a mangled SUV in the far-left lane with cop cars all around it. There were no people, however. No cops, no ambulance, no accident victims, just a wrecked single car and abandoned police cars with blinding lights and no sirens. The air felt oppressive. I passed the wreck and when I looked ahead, there were no other cars on the road. I looked around and even in my mirror, but the only thing behind me was the accident, no other traffic. I swallowed hard, my chest tight, my heart pounding in my ears. I turned off my music and listened but heard...nothing. I continued to the next exit with the intent to stop off, but it was closed, blocked by cones and concrete construction barriers. Then the next exit was marked, but there was no ramp, just a sign with a barricade. It didn’t look like a ramp ever existed. Just a giant sign and an arrow pointing to nothing. I could see cars flowing around me on the other highways and byways, but there wasn’t a single car on my route. I looked down at my GPS and it was flickering back and forth between routes, constantly recalculating. I vaguely recognized the names of some of the exits and knew I was at least travelling in the right direction, but not a single exit from this byway to the main highway was available. The car felt like it was closing in on me. I struggled to breathe, and my vision was getting cloudy. Yet another exit passed that was closed off. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening as I realized that I’d left Dallas, but I was travelling northwest and needed to go northeast. But not a single northeast exit had been opened and no northwest ramps existed. I began to panic, being funneled endlessly in this direction with no way to get off it. My vision tunneled. I felt faint. Almost as though I was going to fall asleep at the wheel unwillingly, poisoned, my body and mind wanting to shut down. All of a sudden, the GPS came back online and an exit to my right opened for the main highway that would take me home. Everything came rushing at me, lights seemed to whiz past at lightning speed before everything cleared up. I laughed almost hysterically, manically, as my lane merged with the lane of the opposite directions’ byway, and it fed onto a dual ramp to the main highway. I ended up in a long line of cars. I looked behind me and there were cars lined up behind me as well, a snake of headlights going on as far as I could see in the mirror. I could breathe easily again, and my phone dinged at least a dozen times in a row. The last message that flashed across my screen was my husband asking, “Why aren’t you answering the phone? Are you ok?” I looked at the time. It was after eleven and I was still thirty minutes from home. The milage on my dashboard had logged that I’d only driven a dozen or so miles. The message to my husband that I was leaving the restaurant had a small 9:10PM timestamp on it. None of these things coincided or were even possible. When I finally arrived home, I didn’t even have the words to explain to my husband what had happened. He told me that my phone had repeatedly gone to voicemail and that he’d been extremely worried. But I had no real explanation other than telling him the story that sounded completely fake. I’m sure he thought I’d just had a bit too much to drink, even though I hadn’t had any alcohol at all. I entered the directions into my GPS and studied them. I looked closely at where I had been and the exits I should’ve passed. None of them were on the same route. None of the indicated exit signs I’d seen were connected in any way. The only thing I could see for sure was that the spot that I had seen the car accident and the spot that I had exited to get to the main highway were right next to each other. I tried to remember the accident. It had been a black SUV. I drove a black SUV. Chilled to the bone, I remembered how there was no people. No accident victims, no police, and no other cars around. But the pervasive feeling through everything I could remember was fear. Where had I gone? Had I died on the first go around? When I passed the accident had I been passing through a spirit world? An alternate timeline? I snuggled up with my cat and my husband and wondered if perhaps there had been a glitch somewhere and I wasn’t meant to die. That I hadn’t yet fulfilled my purpose.