When the sky came down...

Is there a word for that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? Perhaps thinking, will this moment be the last time I see them? As the too-huge world comes vaulting before you. But we can't know for sure if it was a final goodbye. So we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

He woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was one of the distinct times in his life, the strangest moment of all, when he didn't know who he was - he was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room he'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and he looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who he was for about fifteen strange seconds. He wasn't scared; he was just somebody else, some stranger, and his whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.