Destination: Ignition

Parents. Self Examination. Destination. Existentialism.

I turn around with all the trepidation a single turning motion can manifest in a human body. I'm looking at the blackest daemon I've ever seen, a billion of his white eyes staring right back at me. I'm distraught for a moment. This is the edge of the universe.

Me?

Well, I've traveled a tangled path since my conception, a born wanderer of these dark, frost-tipped mountains my whole life. I've always had something to hold on to during my deep treks into the abyss. My mother's protection stayed with me wherever I went, remembering to go the speed limit past planets filled with life and death, stars of eruptive strength, moon's of ghostly luminance. I've fought against a myriad of space-pirate scum, befriended alien species you could only dream of having and torn through the stringiest of worm holes, leaving only bad time behind me, all in her name. My father taught me how to run my ship well; I've been sailing these black tides in his trademark downward slope fashion ever since I got a handle of the control systems. He personalized the grid himself, starting with that big red button for "ignition." That's easier to remember than reprogramming it myself, right? You could say I've sailed my ship into a few wrong turns here and there, a couple of undone screws from the engine pressure. I've never meant to go outside the boundaries of what my ship can handle, a stable ideology my parents had taught me in my youthful years in the spaceflight academy; Those were the very days my destiny had been written through the sky.

This beat up piece of machinery I call a transportation device had puttered out at the very edge of all existence, my woven destiny utterly behind me. I only threw one thing at a wall and I really can't remember what it was; you could say I had a mild emotional breakdown. Here were all these tiny, beady stars I'd been connecting like dots since the very beginning of my life's journey and none of my past plotting made sense anymore; the yarn I left behind must have been strung with invisible fabric.

The mirror of a windshield I once peered through (mostly caused by the terminal blackness of space) was just a Pollock portrait placed their to tease me. All that time and energy, all my wandering and fallen bolts I could never screw back into my ship again...

Now staring through my very own wide-screen ink blot, parts of which I had traveled, others of which I still had time to visit and still others of which a therapist would later find disturbing: right then, something happened to my f*****g eyes.

“Woh.
Is that seriously
a cloud-shaped star system
I'm seeing out there?
That is!
I don't believe
what my visors
are seeing right now.”

And a fist shaped system too. No, no that's a heart shaped one. And a person dancing to music and a table of friends and a girl's beautiful smile. They were right in front of me, all this time, and yet I had been running circles around them until I finally hit a ledge. For a moment I wondered what my invisible yarn would've shown me in the stars had it not been invisible yarn; it must have always been a malicious sentient creature that knew he'd get his a*s kicked if I ever found him after this episode.

Looking down at the control pads of my ship, I begin reprogramming (a process that takes time) not just my plotted course into new territory, but also the grid's controlling functions themselves. I like the color green so I'll make that the "ignition".