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Each step forward took her no further, and likewise with turning around. Her own monologue screamed at her to stay on the path every time she walked into the desert on her right or left, only to find the same road moments after she left it, footprints still intact.

The only things she had to keep her company were the dying shrubs on the edges of the dirt road. She never tried talking to them, although after long enough she considered it. They probably could not speak, and if they could their voices would be rasp and coarse from the climate.

The sun never moved. It sat completely still, near sunset, in the direction she had begun walking minutes or hours or days or weeks ago. It was the only thing that offered some sense of direction. A breeze never blew through the flat, infinite desert and the sand never moved unless she trekked off the path. The clouds above never moved and the sky was perpetually a canvas of orange, pink, and deep indigo.

Perhaps she should have realized earlier that something was wrong.

It was dinner, and she threw her plate and shouted things she shouldn’t have said to people who didn’t deserve to hear that. She slammed the door behind her and walked onto an unfamiliar path that led into the desert as the sun barely began settling onto the horizon.

Moments after getting on the road, she pursed her lips and furrowed her brow. The anger subsided and shame that wished she could take back everything she said replaced it.

“I’m sorry!” she shouted at the sun. It did not reply.

“I don’t understand!” she shouted at the sky. No one replied.

Anything she shouted went into the void. Her mind raced with theories to explain this: hallucinations, time loops, spatial displacement. But there was no explanation. There was no proof for anything. Even if there was, it's not like she had the ability or scientific experience to be able to prove she was trapped in a time loop. After the first few hours she just gave up trying to figure out where she was and instead focus on how to get out.

The road winded through the desert as the sun was setting, but it straightened out and stretched into the distance. She swallowed the feeling in her throat and let her shame push her forward, and maybe more time away would lead to forgiveness.

She told herself she would only walk for a few hundred years to avoid night but soon after walking the straight road she realized it hadn’t become dark. In fact, nothing had changed. She turned around and tried walking back from where she came but never found the winding path she stomped down.

After giving up on understanding why this was happening, she made her first attempt to flee into the desert, which did not work. She ran maybe fifty yards before coming across the same road she left.

She collapsed without breathing heavily but with tears streaming from her eyes. Panic set in and she sat on the road for a long time thinking of nothing.

Hours, days, maybe even weeks passed as she continued walking. She turned around one more time with the same result so she decided to just keep walking towards the sun. She never got tired or hungry or thirsty. The sand never got into her shoes and her hair never got greasy.

The shrubs on the side of the road were not patterned, seemingly scattered at random. When she wasn’t paying attention she was pricked by a cactus but it left no mark and did not bleed and she told herself it definitely should’ve.

“Let me go!” she screamed at the dirt road beneath her, but it didn’t respond.

To keep herself entertained she thought through just about everything that had ever happened in her life. She had many arguments with the boy who took her to prom but kissed her cousin at the dance, sometimes ending in tears or apologies or never being resolved. She talked through all the names she wanted to name the kids she never had and listed the egregious names her brother would use.

“Thorn. Wrath. Barty. Rask,” she named to no one. He was edgy, she was not.

She listed every name she could remember in alphabetical order. She perfected the alphabet backwards and walking in a straight line with her arms up and feet touching each other (for no particular reason of course). She wrote books in her head and told stories and retold those stories and lived hundreds of lives as different writers, lawyers, public speakers, mothers, politicians, and anything in between.

Every so often she got her hopes up thinking that, like a movie, she would stumble over the finish line. Finding the end had to happen. Right?

Right?

But it never happened.

She also never stopped.

Maybe if anyone else had gotten on the road they would’ve laid down and given up a long time ago. If she had thrown her plate at her best friend and stormed off to her room instead of leaving, maybe her best friend would’ve gone on a walk to think, like her, and then find herself on the road. Maybe she would’ve given up. Maybe not.

“How much further?” she finally asked the shrubs, who did not respond. She rolled her eyes. Why did she let herself get her hopes up?

And so she continued on. On and on and on and on. On the endless road. So endless that any amount of distress was probably hundreds of miles behind her. Further along than the distress was the looming fear of eternity on this road, and just behind her was the hope that the shrubs would speak back.

Each step forward took her no further, but she did not know that. She would never understand what was happening, never get any answer to her purgatory on an infinite dirt road through the flat desert. She would never get answers.

And neither will you.