This man had ripped the band-aid off.
It’s hard for me to talk about these events. All this happened so many years ago, but due to their increasingly unsettling nature, I feel it is both my blessing and curse to be able to tell this story.
My encounter with this man-in-black had catapulted me into a strange world. You have to understand that I felt both as close and as far away from home as I could possibly be. There was a paradoxical nature to my experience that defies language. What I saw was familiar, the cobblestone alleyways of the lovely European town I had called my home, the peaks of churches, museums and mausoleums. Everything was right where I had left it. It was something about the colors, the people. Everything seemed estranged. The closer you looked, the more you realized that something was off.
As I walked through these alleys, I soon passed what was the central train station of this town, and this was where I experienced the most glaring display of my new normal. In this world, large, never ending pipes replaced all methods of transportation. These pipes would grow like a web and fly towards the sky. There was something so menacing about the sheer volume of pipes, they were everywhere. And that’s what it was. The closer you looked, the more you saw them.
I watched as a group of men boarded a pipe that then propelled itself into the sky. I saw them fly off over the very rooftops that disguised themselves as my home. Nothing was where it belonged. I can only describe what I felt as pure, unadulterated excitement. A rush of life that scared me so deeply, and not because of these nonsensical surroundings. I was scared of myself. I liked this. To be in between worlds, in this place where I could finally put to rest my preconceived notions. If pipes can fly, then so can I.
—
You are currently traveling through the 1990s nightmare of Pipedreams. Each narrative fragment in this collection unravels a peculiar memory of a man drawn into an alternate reality by a looming figure in a suit. In this world, the mundane is flipped on its head as giant pipes carry more than just water. These tales offer a glimpse into this bizarre dimension, both infinitely monotonous and threatening at once. Based on a true story.
