The Silence of Bond Street, Bend, Oregon

I Woke Up Walking

The sky was torn wide—half-dream, half-something starving.
Stars hung like shattered teeth in the black.

Bond Street was empty, but not quiet.
Cities don’t go quiet.
Even when the people are gone, the bones still hum.
Concrete still remembers footsteps.
Windows still reflect faces that aren’t there.

Bend felt wrong.
Like it had cracked in my absence, like the mountains had spit something out they should’ve swallowed.
The air smelled the same—pine, old rain, dust and asphalt.
But the wind? The wind carried voices I never wanted to hear again.
Memories I didn’t fucking ask for.
Ghosts that weren’t done with me.

Were they waiting for me?
Or just waiting to watch me leave again?

Shadows stretched too far under the streetlamps,
dragging themselves out past their own limits.
A neon sign flickered in a window—
OPEN.
But the store behind it was dead.
Lights off. Door locked.
Dust so thick on the glass it blurred my reflection.

Then I heard it.

Footsteps.

Not mine.

I turned fast—
nothing but my own breath, sharp in the cold, thick in my throat,
hanging in the air like a bad decision, like a debt still unpaid.

Then, from the alley—

A shape. Watching.

Not a man.
Not quite something else, either.

Tall. Wrapped in night.
Face shifting—
a blur of static, of light bent the wrong way.
Moving like mist, like memory, like something that already knew how this ended.

I tried to speak.
But my voice? My voice stayed behind.

Then it moved.

Not toward me—
around me.
A slow orbit, deliberate,
like it was trying to remember where it had seen me before.

The wind howled up, sharp as snapped bone,
pulled at my coat, rattled the café tables like brittle ribs.

Then it whispered—
but not in words.

Not in sound.

A feeling, pressed deep into my chest,
something weightless but undeniable.

“You’ve been here before. Why come back?”

And it wasn’t asking.

I knew it. I fucking felt it.
This place wasn’t mine anymore.
Maybe it never was.

No doors left unlocked.
No ghosts left willing to share their graveyard.
No unfinished letters, no hands reaching for mine.

Dream or not, I was trespassing.

And whatever this was—
it didn’t want me back.

I should’ve known.
I should’ve remembered.

The way the city feels from the top of Pilot Butte, alone.
The road curling up the mountain like a vein pumping toward something bigger.
The hum of the engine, windows down,
air thick with dust and silence.

Up there, the whole town laid itself out,
streetlights blinking like tired eyes in the dark.
Headlights dragging themselves through the neighborhoods.
The river carving a path, steady, silent, uncaring.

Up there, I used to feel like I could hold it all,
like the town still had space for me,
like I was stitched into it somewhere,
even if I never found where.

But even Mt. Bachelor doesn’t call my name anymore in winter.
Even the wind doesn’t wrap around me the same way in summer.
Not even in these dreams.

The streetlights dimmed.
The sky cracked.
The whole town inhaled—waiting for me to get the hell out.

I exhaled.

I walked.

And then, just like that—

I woke up.