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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/glssshrk on 2024-10-09 20:34:08+00:00.

The dream never began with anything particularly noteworthy. Sometimes when I woke up I remembered little bits of the beginning, these quick ideas about being lost or aimless in a strange city. A sense that I needed to get off the street and find safety indoors flickered in the back part of my awareness, so I hurried through the nearest door. Often times, I didn’t remember the first part too much. But the middle act always stayed with me, the part where I had to run. 

Something followed me, kept pace just out of my range of vision. I sprinted away from it, through a labyrinth of interconnecting buildings. An ancient library flowed into a rotting hospital, which led to a huge array of unoccupied cubicles lit by dying fluorescent lights. The path changed, circled back, refused to make any sense by the standards of the waking world. And, really, the choices I made didn’t matter anyway. In the end it always caught me. I never saw it but sensed it gaining on me. A terrible thing that would never stop. It could chase me forever. Closer, closer, here. My stomach dropped, and I woke up. 

It used to bother me. In childhood I often slept with the lights on, not out of fear of the dark but because I was always trying to put off falling asleep. This was before we had internet, so I spent the nights reading mostly. Eventually I would succumb to exhaustion, pass out face down on a tattered paperback, and the forgotten lamp would coat my room in its dim yellow light until morning. It’s weird how even a little lost sleep makes you detach a bit from reality. I meandered through my boyhood in a haze of sleeplessness. Later I tried medications, both legal and, ahem, less legal to see if I could stamp the dream out. Of course, nothing worked.

Much later, when adulthood extinguished the jumpiness of childhood, I stopped minding the dream so much. I became a man, got married, got a good job. In all the busyness of day to day life I was too tired for nightmares. On the off night I did happen to find myself in my dream city, at least I knew where I was, what I had to do, what would happen. I even woke up with a kind of strange comfort, the ease of familiarity. After all, it was just a bad dream. I outgrew my fear. In light of what’s happened, I wonder if that’s why it waited so long to show me its face. Maybe it wanted to lull me into a state of blissful unbelief.  Or perhaps it needed to get me alone.

Eventually I started running in real life. It’s kind of a chicken or the egg thing when I look back on it now. I’m not sure if the dream inspired me, or if it was my own tendency toward the flight part of “flight or fight.” Whatever the reason, around my fortieth birthday I bought a pair of very expensive sneakers and took off. 

Ok, maybe “took off” is not the right phrase. I plodded off. Running, it turned out, was harder than I remembered. But I had time to get better. COVID lock downs forced my company to embrace remote work, and without the drive time I had a couple extra hours on my hands. 

My wife also had a couple extra hours on her hands. She used those hours to find an attorney and become not my wife anymore. I could have resisted, stretched out the process a little more, but I didn’t. I signed everything she handed me. I figured we’d had a good run. We’d never fought before, no need to start now. 

Now I had even more spare time. 

My runs stretched out into whole afternoons of wandering around the admittedly not great neighborhood that surrounded my also not great new apartment. After a couple miles at a brisk pace (by my standards) I would walk slowly, dreading the return to my empty living room. 

The building I’d moved into after the divorce used to be some kind of warehouse. It’s down by the old port and the decommissioned navy base. The city calls this area “up and coming.” Really it’s mostly abandoned buildings interspersed with the occasional rusty silo. A muddy river runs through it to the Atlantic, with little branches of creeks and marshlands splintering off now and then.

Whoever designed my building tried to carry the industrial look over into the apartments. When I first looked at it with the building’s sales lady, she made a point to coo over the original brick and exposed pipes. Even at opposite ends of the room (social distancing) we were maximally ten feet away from each other. I could see her surgical mask puff out when she spoke. The exposed pipes running across the ceiling made it feel even more claustrophobic. I hated to see the insides of things. It felt like looking at a wound.

I told the sales lady that Rachel would have hated it. She asked softly who Rachel was, and I said my wife, then corrected and said well she used to be. Then I realized from the look on the top half of her face that she thought Rachel was dead. My words fell over each other. I could see them piling up and tangling behind my own mask, one of those cheap black fabric ones you could get off Amazon. The whole situation kind of got away from me, and I suddenly found myself signing a one year lease for an apartment that looked and felt like the setting of one of the Saw movies. 

On the way to my car the triumphant sales lady told me the building had many single residents. Right on cue, a blonde girl with a bouncy ponytail popped out of the door behind us. She smiled politely as she walked past then broke into a light jog down the broken sidewalk. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. 

But before I had time to wax poetic to myself about new starts, an impossibly frail man creaked past on an old bicycle. He wore a tattered suit, capped off by a jaunty motorcycle helmet which appeared to weigh about a hundred pounds. It was the only part of his ensemble that looked new, a pattern of patriotic stars and stripes shining in the golden evening light. His head lolled on his shoulders as his neck struggled with the weight of it. He had somehow rigged several clear plastic bags stuffed to the brim with cans to the back of the bike. They rustled against each other as he pedaled past us. 

I think he nodded at the sales lady, but it was hard to tell if it was intentional or just the weight of the helmet pulling his head down. She glanced briefly at him, then turned to hustle back to her office.

A block away the blonde girl had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk for a quick quad stretch, so the can man had to bump off the curb into the gutter to avoid her. It would be an easy maneuver for someone less rickety, but I thought for sure this guy would wind up sprawled in the road, cans everywhere. Somehow he pulled it off. For a moment the stars and stripes of his helmet turned her way ever so slightly. Then he kept on riding, cans rustling into the distance. The girl didn’t take much notice of him. In a moment, she ran off. Her neon pink running shoes flashed away in the glow of the sunset.

A few days later I moved in my small but growing collection of Ikea furniture and the few odds and ends I’d hung on to in the divorce. Between the masks and the social distancing, there was no possibility of meeting anyone either in the building or out of it. We couldn’t even share the elevator. At some point the management had put up a sign restricting it to one household per trip. The loneliness compounded when I gradually discovered the group of friends I had accumulated over the years were all actually Rachel’s friends. Things became very quiet in my world.

I tried to embrace the enforced asceticism of my new lifestyle. This was the perfect opportunity for me to finally embrace the self-improvement ideals I always scrolled past on TikTok. COVID couldn’t go on forever, and when it ended I would be ready, a new man. I filled my fridge with bagged salads and the healthiest looking TV dinners at the store. I tracked my weight and muscle density on an app. At night, I read self help books while the filtered sounds of laughter from the apartment next door drifted in through the vents. I even got a journal, although I never could think of anything to put in it.

The only self care task I really enjoyed was the running. I ran every day, mostly after work, but before the sun went down. By the end of summer my mile time had dipped under the ten minute mark, and I felt like I was really on my way to something. Occasionally I saw the woman I’d mentally nicknamed “Ponytail” out running in the early evenings too. She went a lot faster than me. 

I always took the same route. Turning right out of my building took me to a train yard with a high fence, so I went left. On the inland side of the road I could see the collapsing roofs of the old navy base, and on the water side I passed mostly rehabilitated warehouses much like the one I’d come out of. There were docks on the other side of those buildings, but I couldn’t see them without venturing off the main road. The farther I went from home, the less rehabilitated the structures became, until I hit a row of fully abandoned depots. I crossed three rusted steel bridges over tidal creeks, then turned back when I hit a series of huge silos that still seemed to be in use. This path took me about three miles away, then I used the three miles back to delay sitting by myself in the confinement of my apartment.  

It wasn’t the best part of town, but despite the intermittent reports I saw on the news, I never worried too much about my safety. The only thing that gave me pause was the traffic. Not many ca…

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