We're in a pandemic, so, of course, I'm thinking about James Cameron's AVATAR.

Here's the story of how I saw it in theaters.

First, some background. I live in a REALLY RURAL area. Like, imagine a small town, then replace like half the population in your imagination with chickens and cows.

(We're not North Dakota, though, so don't go too far.)

Anyway! We actually have a movie theater! Sort of!

There is one (1) movie theater in the entire county.

I cannot describe to you how bad it is.

It is...old. Very, very old. A movie theater in a city an hour away was condemned, and my movie theater bought up the seats and installed them and it was an improvement.

The stadium seating is made of exposed plywood and rusty nails and this is not exaggeration but facts.

Once, we stayed late to see the after credits scene of a movie, and they just turned the lights on after, and the entire theater was flooded with lights and I almost threw up when I saw what it actually looked like. There were multiple dirty diapers stuck to seats.

Anyway, I digress. This story is about James Cameron's AVATAR.

So, as we all know, we've somehow gotten stuck in a weird timeline. It's not the DARKEST timeline (that one has robot zombie overlords), but it's still a pretty bad timeline. And I think James Cameron's AVATAR is where the timelines diverged.

This movie, for those of you whose minds have been erased (see: dark timeline), was an Extremely Popular Movie that also no one watched or remembers?

There were exactly thirteen and a half days where no one talked about literally anything else BUT James Cameron's AVATAR. You would open your mouth to ask what's for dinner and instead the words "have you seen James Cameron's AVATAR yet?" would slip out.

I tried to resist seeing it, but by this point, I'd already been sucked into the diverging timeline, and it was inevitable. I just didn't know it yet.

So, my husband and I went to see this movie at the local theater. We went to the very last showing of the night, so the movie was letting out kind of late, probably like 11pm or something.

Still, this was the Most Popular Movie in Existence EVER and the source of diverging timelines (although, again, no one knew it yet), and this was still pretty early in its release. It's a small town, but...we did not expect to be the only people in the theater.

Literally it was just me, my husband, and weird blue aliens.

This ended up being an amazing thing! No one else was there, so we basically heckled the blue aliens and laughed at all the emotional bits and mocked the tree and it was a Good Time.

Then the movie ended.

And we walked out. And...there was no one in the theater.

No one.

No other people who'd been watching any other movies. No workers. No one at the concession stand. No cleaners.

Also we'd been locked inside.

There were low-level lights on throughout the building, but there were literally no humans anywhere.

Through the glass doors, we could see that there was only one car in the parking lot. Ours.

"Hello?" we called.

Nothing.

We tried the doors.

Locked.

Eventually, we just...unlocked the doors and walked out and hoped for the best.

Now, at the time, we didn't know that the timelines had diverged at exactly this moment. Sometime during the movie, the entire universe shifted and set us on the weird path that led to Donald Trump telling America to inject bleach. That's a real sentence I just wrote.

I guess what I'm saying is, you didn't expect to read a story about a theater that's held together with dirty diapers and raw plywood and a movie that's the Most Popular But Also No One Remembers It and how we got abandoned in the locked theater afterwards, but anyway

I'm pretty sure this is when our planet got put on the dark timeline, and I'm sorry. But it all adds up.

-No one remembers ever seeing the Most Popular Movie
-That movie theater is obviously cursed and WOULD be the epicenter of timeline shifts
-Humanity abandoned us there