Deja Vu View

I’m not one prone to superstition. But I do love glitches in the matrix, déjà vu, or those weird moments that have an explanation but seem sublime at the time.

I walked a massive loop so that I could traverse 112 in the dark. To hear the horses answer me as I called, because they want to be petted even at 3:00 a.m. To stand in the middle of the darkness and be blanketed by the thunder of insects.

Coming back, I didn’t realize I overshot the connecting road back to my apartment. I turned down Sycamore heading east as I admired the beautiful brick inlay crosswalk. A man on a three-wheeled bicycle startled me just as much as I startled him. He wasn’t there a second before and he certainly seemed surprised for me to appear in front of him. On the back of his bicycle was a stack of bread rolls. It’s not something you see every day, a man on a three-wheeled bicycle with a cart in the back, holding bread rolls that early in the morning.

Even though I was heading east toward home, I realized I had turned south on Lawson. I started getting that weird vibe. So instead of turning back, I kept going. I hadn’t been to the next block in a few weeks. They’re building some beautiful residences along there.

When I hit the corner of Lawson and Oakland, I was astonished to see a fully finished two-story building on the corner. I couldn’t believe the building appeared in an empty lot so quickly. A white four-door sedan was too close to the corner. I noticed it because the overhead street light illuminated the interior of the car. I noticed no one was in the car, even though it felt like I was going to see someone behind the wheel. I also took a moment to smell the scent of wood smoke from somewhere nearby. It’s too early in the year to smell it, but it was a welcome preface to the October just around the corner.

After a block, I turned to head back around to home. Even though I wanted to, I knew I couldn’t walk forever. I’d already forgotten about my astonishment at seeing the new construction being finished on the corner.

Walking back along the same street from the other direction, I noticed the huge vertical stack of wooden pallets next to the street sign. The light coming through them made a really interesting pattern. I took out my phone to take a picture.

That’s when the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I was standing at the corner of Oakland and Lawson, the same corner where I’d experienced the surprise of seeing the building appear so quickly since the last time I went through.

The corner doesn’t have a building on it. It’s just foundations. And of course there was no white four-door sedan under the street light.

I had a cup of coffee before I started my long walk, and even though I had walked a couple of hours, tiredness didn’t explain the hallucination of seeing the completed building or the car parked under the steet light.

All I could do was laugh at the absurdity of attributing it to my overactive imagination or unexpected deja vu.

If I come back to Oakland and Lawson in a few months, I expect to see two-story buildings on the corner. They’ll be dark blue or dark gray with the windows trimmed in white. And maybe there will be a white four-door car under the street light.

I didn’t capture the stack of pallets that would be on the right side of the picture. It took quite a bit for the feeling of deja vu to disappear. I finally gave in to the urge to look at my watch to see that it was really the 27th of September. I would not have been surprised if the date wasn’t what I expected.

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