I saw a witch yesterday.

I’m not talking about a Wicca witch, or the Goth that lives next door and cultivates black roses. I’m talking about a throat-to-boot, black-muslin-and-lace, dark-haired, thin-faced witch.

She was standing in the shadows of an overpass along the route I sometimes take to work. This was a surface road, not a highway or anything. There were houses and business nearby. It was raining. She was just standing there. I only saw her for a moment.

She probably wasn’t a witch. She might have been homeless. Or she might have been the owner of a nearby business, pausing in the lee of the overpass, waiting for cars to pass so she could make her way to her shop and open the doors. Or she was someone with some free time out for a stroll in the misty rain, enjoying one of our first damp days since last spring.

Or a witch.

The point isn’t really whether or not she was a person with actual magical abilities involved in some arcane interaction with an unseen, supernatural world that the rest of us never see at all or, if we do, only catch peripherally–a glimpse, a glance, a strange few seconds caught in between the over-there and the over-to-the-next place that 25mph on a surface road allows us.

The point is that there are whole worlds out there that, even if they aren’t as mystically mysterious as a society of witches and possibly warlocks out dealing with shadowy monsters and subterranean politics that will never be reported on the evening news, are still, just as surely, out there.

Or sometimes maybe we do get a glimpse of them on the evening news, after all. For instance, Flock cameras are being sabotaged at an alarming (at least to the company that makes Flock cameras) rate. These cameras, if you didn’t know, track your license plate as you move from place to place. And no, they aren’t just activated when the police (or whoever) are looking for a particular criminal; they’re always activated, always tracking; and though they’re always tracking everyone, that also means that they’re always tracking you.

But there are individuals and groups out there who are risking jail and ruined lives to dismantle, destroy, and deceive the Flock cameras. Very reminiscent of the protagonists of William Gibson’s cyberpunk stories, stories about a neon future where corporations make a few people very wealthy and very powerful while everyone else pretty much toils along in quiet servitude, distracted by various entertainments while the economic and societal gaps grow larger. But also a future where the occasional individual or group chips away at the power of the over-class in small-to-slightly-less-small rebellions.

You know, a fictional future. Er…wait.

Briefly seeing that woman on the side of the road, standing there in the shadows, tall and prim, but equally dark and mysterious and somehow dangerous, made me think once again how easily those of us who live in relative comfort can get caught up in our lives and believe that everyone else’s lives must be very similar: go to work, have a beer, scroll our phones, watch some tv, laugh with friends, make our dinners, have our breakfasts, pop over to the store.

It’s easy to forget that there are people out there risking all of that comfort (or maybe who never had it at all) in order to participate in secret worlds where hackers reveal corporate banking strategies, where rebels destroy surveillance cameras, where whistleblowers meet with journalists in echoing parking garages (or over pancakes at Waffle House), where William Gibson’s cyberpunk world of the future happened yesterday, but we didn’t notice because we don’t live in a one-room studio apartment with a neon “COLA” advertisement glowing in through the one grimy window.

One where maybe witches have truck with shadows on misty, Pacific Northwest days beneath dripping overpasses and we’d never know, because there’s a super-funny TikTok you need to share with your bestie.

The way we live our lives is not the only way that lives are led. Sometimes it takes a little bit of magic to remember that.