Abington High School Student Arts Magazine 2015-2016 | Page 6

deserted in thoughts

Step by step, nothing but blackness. It smells damp and musty, like an old, unfinished basement that floods in a rainstorm. You hear each breath and heartbeat coming from you. You're scared, and feel cramped in a small space but don't see anything. It feels as if you're traveling in a tunnel that is your exact height and shoulder width. Your chest has that pressure in it like when you're on an airplane, descending in altitude. However, every thirty seconds, a light flickers in the disctance, like a lighter being ignited and quickly blown out, giving you just enough hope of escape to run as fast as possible. But after fifteen seconds, you give up. What's the

point really? Chasing after

a glimpse of light, you

know you'll never make it,

so there's no point in

trying. As many times as

you want to curl up in a ball,

you also want to sprint, beat

the odds and the lights

to come on again, fully,

not just a flicker, and

pretend to laugh at a horrible and terrifying joke.

And they do.

The lights come on, but it is most definitely not the same place you were in before. You're alone, in a white room, blinding white almost, and clothed in a plain black outfit. The room smells like a doctor's office, like hydrogen peroxide and with an artist-like sketch of corners and edges like the three-dimensional boxes you used to try to draw on paper as a kid. The lines in the corners even look like they were drawn in pencil and you can see smudge marks from fingers being accidentally drawn across the perfect lines just made. This place drives you insane, at least in the tunnel there was hope, but here, there's nothing. You sit in a corner, and fall into a deep sleep, in hopes of when you wake up, that there is some way out, out into a place, or back to your old life, rather than a place with no hope.

You awake leaning against a tree.

You are in the same plain outfit, but barefoot. You realize that the tree you are leaning against is immense like those in a rainforest, and damp, making your shirt stick to your back, and the ground you are sitting on is covered in moss. The moss is wet; as you get up your feet sink in, and you need to pull them back up with force, like suction cups off of a window. The area you are in is hot and muggy, your breathing is thick and heavy, making you take long deep breathes. You realize you are in a rainforest, but even with this place's beauty, you know how much it rains in rainforests, and cccccccccccccccccccccare worried that you will

cccccccccccccccccccccnot be able to find cccccccccccccccccccccshelter on high ground cccccccccccccccccccccin time. Your heart cccccccccccccccccccccstarts to beat harder, cccccccccccccccccccccyour thoughts are cccccccccccccccccccccblurred, and your head cccccccccccccccccccccbegins to spin as panic ccccccccccccccccccccc and anxiety creep into cccccccccccccccccccccyour mind. As many cccccccccccccccccccccpeople do, you start to ccccccccccccccccccccchyperventilate and cry. The trees don't have any branches you can reach. As you try to calm yourself down, loneliness pangs you in the heart. You're all alone, no strong person to calm you down, no family, no friends, no one to hug, not even a complete stranger or animal. You try to blink away the tears, momentarily calming yourself down. You close your eyes for one moment.

The whole time you have been in your mind. Your thoughts and feelings expressed to you during an odd state. But what you really want to know is, are you alive or was this just an insight showing you that life is nothing but what you believe. Is a soul or thought process all you are? You remember your life, but was it real? What even is real? Can it be defined? Is life really just a pile of thoughts animated into what seems like a dream? Are there other worlds that are created by others' thoughts? The answers can only be defined by you now.

"This place drives you insane, at least in the tunnel there was hope, but here, there's nothing."

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