The Isolation Journals - Day 27

Let's get right into it today.

This prompt is from writer/essayist Jordan Kisner, whose new book, Thin Places, sounds intriguing.

Prompt:  Describe a “thin place” or threshold you’ve encountered. It could be a location, an experience, a relationship, a period of time. Describe it in as much concrete detail as you can: what did you see, smell, feel with your hands? How did it make you feel? Who else was there? What led you there? What did you do? What happened afterward? Did anything change? It may feel hard to describe—that's ok! Ineffable experiences are the hardest to describe. Get weird!

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I'm not religious or even spiritual.  I try to look for rational explanations and am quick to dismiss odd coincidences as just that.  But some things are just too damn weird.

I have a story I like to call my alien abduction story, partly because, 17 years later, I still don't understand what actually happened.  Also because insisting it was an alien abduction makes my hyper-rational husband irrationally irate.

And look, let me preface this by saying I don't think I was literally, physically visited by aliens after senior prom.  All I'm saying is, something weird and unexplained happened, and I promise no drugs or alcohol were involved.

This was now half my lifetime ago, and I can still remember the disorientation and confusion.  We had so many questions.  How did we get there?  How did that much time elapse?  The one thing we did know was exactly what everyone at the party was going to say when we showed up half an hour late.

What happened was, my high school boyfriend and I had a great time at our senior prom with all our friends.  Dancing, eating, stealing people's disposable cameras and taking close-up pictures of our bent elbows so it would look like butt cheeks when they got the film back weeks later.  You know, fun.

At the end of the night, we were all headed to a totally wholesome, parent-chaperoned party in a friend's basement.  The prom was held at a venue a few towns over, and we weren't totally familiar with the area in the dark, so we were following hand-written directions, probably from my mom.  This was 2003, so no smart phones yet, no GPS built into the 1985 Ford Escort with manual everything and only AM radio.  

I was navigating, he was driving, and we rode along in relative quiet, carefully looking out for each turn indicated in the directions.  We didn't miss a street, or make a wrong turn, but all of a sudden, we found ourselves at the end of a dead end street, coasting to a stop when it felt like moments before, we had been traveling at 45 or 50 mph.  We both felt groggy, as if we were just waking up.  Were we lost?  Where the hell were we?  We checked the time.  The whole drive from prom to after-party should have taken maybe 20 minutes.  But there we were in the middle of the woods, it seemed, and more than half an hour had passed since we left the prom venue.  

We had no choice but to turn around and drive back out the dead end street.  None of it looked familiar in the way it should have if we had just driven down the same street minutes earlier.  We eventually came back to a road we recognized from the directions, got our bearings, and found our way to the party, half an hour late.  

We tried to explain to everyone that we had just been, like, abducted by aliens, but of course no one believed us.  All we heard in response was, "off like a prom dress, right guys?" or, "don't come a knockin' when the Escort's a rockin'."  That was a little insulting, but I guess we still had the last laugh when they got their disposable camera pictures developed...