Gregory felt himself sinking into the abyss. The boundaries,the lines, between him and the instrument blurred and blended until there was no difference. There was no him. No instrument. It was all one big blur. The city around him disappeared into the background, slowly melted into a misty[something] of color, and all that mattered was the feeling that coursed through his body.

The city street could have been any city street in the Midwest,but this particular one was Fifth Street in Columbia, a small city in central Missouri that desperately wanted to be big. The street was a two way, with the gray concrete or asphalt or whatever was used to surface city streets nowadays was dotted along its spine with yellow dashes of color that served to separate the cars going one way from the cars going the other. It was a mirage, really,a sense of security that didn’t really serve any solid purpose at all. It all came down to trust. The cars going north trusted that the dashed yellow line would be strong enough to keep the cars going south from crossing over and crashing into the cars going north. A lot of things were like that – the sense of safety we feel walking down the street is nothing more than a mirage. Bad things can happen at any moment and there isn’t really anything that can stop those bad things from happening. It doesn’t matter how many cops are working their beats, what kind of security system you buy, or how careful you are about putting your seatbelt on.

Gregory knew that better than anyone.

(c) Lori Robinett