The incessant hum of the orange streetlamp flickering. The light patter of a rodent’s feet scurrying. The belabored cough of the occasional pickup truck trudging along. The unrelenting soundtrack to my life playing over and over and over again.
        The cacophony grows to a dull rumble, an itch resting along the inner wall of my skull, just beyond my reach, begging to be scratched, and I roam the damp asphalt streets just as I did yesterday, just as I will do tomorrow.
        I peer down at my numb feet, making sure they are, in fact, still intact. The gaping hole in my once-white size 6 Sketchers covered in french-fry oil, dry mud and what looks to be stale urine, bursting at every seam, trying so desperately to cling to my worn out size 7½ feet has grown. One naked toe stares back at me ugly and unclean but certainly intact.
        Bitter and sharp, the raw air flies toward me, biting my nose and stinging cheeks. I shuffle my feet faster, curl my toes in further, hug the tattered sweatshirt closer to my ribs and turn my head away from winter’s howling breath.
        Through the dim light of the flickering orange bulb above, my eyes find a house, stripped of color, grown over with ivy, struggling to hold itself together with about as much success as my battered, once-white sneakers. Mom’s rickety old rocking chair creaks back and forth on the sinking wooden porch. A broken beer bottle rolls back and forth beside it, knocking in to the others with every gust of wind.
        I turn back towards the road and am immediately blinded by a ball of light as bright as the sun crawling towards me. My hand jumps to shade my eyes and I watch the orb of light split in two.
My body splits in two with it.
I watch myself gathering what energy I can, what bravery I have left. I watch myself breathing heavier, feeling my heart beat faster. I watch myself running out into the street. I watch myself being swallowed by the light. I watch myself being pummeled down. I watch myself scream. I watch myself feel something. I feel something.
        I blink.
I watch my feet stay firmly planted on the side of the road. I watch the red pickup limp by, illuminated by the light of the golden arches. I watch my only chance inch slowly by and I wish that I was the me I imagined a few moments ago rather than the me I am.
        I keep on walking along the road, past my childhood home onto the neighboring plot of land, putting one foot in front of the other until I reach the faded red door of my current residence.
        I’ve lived 23 years and barely moved 23 feet.
        I open the creaking door. A wave of warmth, and a perfume of body odor and flatulence washes over me. I welcome the familiar sensation and ram my shoulder into the door, simultaneously turning the lock, the only way to keep it from popping back open the second it closes.
       The buzz of the streetlamps, the scratch of a rodent’s claws, the sigh of the engine, they are dimmed, but never fully muted.
        I press my forehead into the door, allowing myself to absorb the heat of the stagnant air. I sigh, preparing myself for the next phase of the routine: Dan.
        My boyfriend’s body is slung over the couch, with his mouth parted just enough for a whistle of air to run past his beer-stained teeth and into his tar-filled lungs. A half drunken beer bottle rests just beside the leg of the couch, next to the others.
        I bend over ready to dispose of tonight’s round of bottles when I notice a draft cutting through the stale air. I scan the room in search of the source. A fallen plank of wood lies lifelessly beneath the boarded up window, or at least the hole where the window was before the last tornado.
        I drag myself toward the window, but just before I can pick up the moldy rectangle of withered wood, I find myself fixated on the small slice of night it leaves uncovered.
        I shuffle towards the backdoor and give it a harsh shove. It opens with a loud thump and a crack, but I know it won’t wake Dan-nothing but his own vomit can do that.
        I submerge myself into the frigid air and tilt my chin back as far my stiff neck allows.
        A shroud of suffocating darkness cloaks the world. My face stings and my eyes flood with hot tears as the relentless gusts wash over me. Through the blurriness I see everything around me fading in to the background, slowly melting into the shadow of the night. Not even the drone of the streetlamp or the scrape of the small animal or the pants of the pickup trucks follow me anymore, finally extinguished and replaced by an unbreakable silence. And for a moment I wonder if I will be swallowed by it as well, smothered by the all-consuming darkness weighing down on my small world.
        So I squeeze my eyes shut, suck in the icy air, clench my frozen fists and wait.
        But nothing happens.
        I let the crinkles in my eyelids smooth out and release my fists. The moment my eyes open my mouth does too, taking in a sharp breath of the refreshing night air.
The darkness revealed something that the lights kept hidden.
        My feet flatten the overgrown grass, my arms pump, my mind spins. I am in front of the rundown shack I call home, looking out at that same road I travel day after tedious day realizing that I have only ever seen a fraction of it. This road stretches on into the darkness for miles and miles and miles, rolling over the side of the earth only twenty or thirty streetlamps down into unchartered territory.
        With each step forward, the path ahead grows, another streetlamp pokes through the distant ground. And with the golden light on my back I keep on running, away from that house I know far too well, yes, but also toward the darkness I know nothing of because what I saw in that backyard is something nobody can take from me: tiny holes poked through night’s vast veil.
        Someone must have made it through.
        Maybe I can too.