you turn left at the crossing, right when you exit the alleyway, left again as soon as you reach the sidewalk. the steps are so familiar to you that you hardly realize that the world is falling apart in your wake - but when you walk too close to the edge, when you nearly stumble on the curb and turn to catch yourself, you suddenly do not recognize the streets at all. where you were is gone, filled with visual noise in the shape of streets and storefronts and people, wavering as if to fool you into thinking they are milling about. and as you back away in shock, the sidewalk rips itself from the ground without budging an inch, being swallowed entirely and replaced with what your brain has decided sidewalk should look like today.
hesitantly, you take a step forward. then, another. your third step connects with the ground. your fourth step connects with nothing. your fifth step connects with nothing, too. the further you walk into the nothingness, the less progress you make, and the less the world around you takes the shape of a city. the details that pretend to be faces turn into formless piles of shapes, then into nothing. the geometry of the facades of buildings devolve into large rectangles that are content to always look flat from every angle. you trip over yourself - the only thing here - and you're falling, falling, falling but going nowhere, falling away into the endless abyss, the color of the back of your eyelids,
you open your eyes. your face is pressed against the sidewalk, stinging from being scraped. you unsteadily pull yourself back to your feet, and behind you are the streets that belong there, right where they were. you shake it off, turn around, catch a glimpse of nothing smiling your way out of the corner of your eye, and get back on your way.