Twenty Minutes Vanished on a Ten-Minute Drive

My commute home is ten minutes. I have driven it thousands of times. Out of the lot, four sets of lights, over the little bridge, past the school, into my street. Ten minutes, twelve with traffic.

One ordinary Tuesday I left at exactly six, because I glanced at the dashboard clock as I pulled out. Nothing was strange. The weather was clear. I was not tired. I drove my ten-minute route the way you drive something you could do asleep.

But the road did not end. I went over the little bridge, and past the school, and then I was somehow coming up to the little bridge again, and past the school again, and the streets were right, they were my streets, but they kept arriving in the wrong order and then the right order and then arriving again. I was not lost. I knew exactly where I was at every second. I simply could not get home. I passed my own turn twice and each time the road just carried on past it and looped me back.

I did not feel panic so much as a deep, swimming wrongness, like a dream where you run and the hallway stretches. The whole time the dashboard clock said six-oh-two. It did not move. I watched it. Two minutes, the whole way.

And then, without any transition I can describe, I was turning into my own street, and it let me. I parked. I sat there shaking. I looked at the clock. It read six-fifty. Fifty minutes for a ten-minute drive, and I remembered every one of them, driving in circles that were not circles, while the clock insisted no time had passed at all.

My partner asked why I was late. I said traffic. What else could I say. I take a different route home now, and I do not look at the clock.