This took place in March, 2012 outside a small gas station in the outskirts of Upstate New York. It was a few months after my 20th, birthday, when this happened. I am the eldest daughter of my mother and father. I'm not a little kid with an overactive imagination.

My mother has been having health problems, and we were taking her for a checkup with a specialist four hours away. As I had the backseat with my brother, I took a book to keep me occupied.


I grabbed a copy of Lord of the Rings. I've read it before. I don't know why, I just grabbed it.

Halfway there, we stopped somewhere to get gas. We've been there before, but it was in the middle of nowhere. The station was small, and there was only one other car there other than our own.

I just started to read the book, and I half glanced as we pulled in. I saw an elf in a green pick up truck dart out in front of us! Yeah. My brain took a second to register what happened. I thought maybe something cross-fired, because I was reading at the same time.

What it looked like to me, was Elrond, the Elf Lord, was driving the truck. Now, I'm not making this up, and I'm not saying that it was him. So I turned my head as "it" pulled up along side of us. The driver I saw had long flowing black hair. This I saw clearly. It was styled like in the movie. It even looked like the actor, but they were wearing normal clothes. He had a peach/reddish muscle shirt on, and grey and green army pants.

So, I let myself off the hook because the guy did sort of look like that.

I was about to say to my family, "Did you guys see that guy's hair?" when my father said, "You know who that looked liked?"

Mom: "Your mother?" (Grandma doesn't drive.)

Dad: "No. Mr. Brown" (A guy my dad used to work for.) And my brother thought that it looked like some famous quarterback. So I listened to them argue for a few minutes, and my dad finally won... whatever it was he was winning.

I didn't voice my opinion. I didn't want to tell everyone that I saw an elf. The thing of it is, none of these people look even remotely similar. These were born decades apart and are in varying stages of health.

The thing that got me thinking that this was something really strange was after a while I realized that I even recognized his clothes. There was a video game magazine sitting at home in my brother's room that I just removed from the car that morning. I had spent hours in the car staring at that same picture until we cleaned out the debris. There was this commando wearing a muscle shirt, and grey and green army pants -- exactly like the guy in the car, except for it being peachish/reddish (which reminded me of Elrond).

It's like he changed into the first normal and "familiar" clothes that I thought of.

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