Carver jotted down some notes and nodded slightly. “The experience is different for each person based on personal history, mental schemata, neuro… I’m sorry, I should not… cheapen… your experience with such psychobabble. Please pull over as soon as you’re able.”

The next handful of minutes felt like a fistful of hours as I pondered the experience while trying to find a place to park the car. I finally drew to a halt outside a closed-for-the-night hair salon on the east side. Not a soul was out or about in the gentle mist of a rain that had somehow begun while my mind had been elsewhere.

“Excellent. This will do. Please exit the car.” The manner in which Carver’s pen was poised above the paper seemed like a spoiler of some new impossibility to come. I could scarcely lend any thought to it as the lingering loss of a place I’d never been still preoccupied my mind.

I pulled the handle and stepped out of the car…

…into the sunny, sylvan ‘homeland’ I had never known before this night.