the longest short story

just kinda an introspective, freeform thing I wrote about some of my experiences

Open your eyes. You’re hurtling faster than you even thought possible through an expanse you can’t quite see, faster, faster, and your eyes are still shut, trying to protect you from the noise of it all. Around you, stars that shine brighter than a million of our suns race each other to the other end of the sky; moons travel an inescapable orbit around a disapproving world; entire galaxies are born and unborn in an instant while you are numb and empty. And then you stop, as suddenly as you started, and it is finally calm. You open your eyes, and you breathe air you didn’t know you could breathe, and you fall, 10, 50, 100, 200 feet and you lose track of the distance as you fall out of the vacuum of space. You land, and your bones shudder, as if they know how you want them to break, how you crave the desecration of your own unworthy flesh and how you wish against the odds for your heart to be ripped out of your still beating chest. Inside the heart you so badly wish you could kill, two rose petals lie dead, one yellow and curling at the edges, the other already a dark brown. Around you, dandelion seeds drift along the currents of the wind, thousands of them, clumping together and swirling around each other until it is impossible to distinguish one from another. An acorn, thrown aloft, sticks to one seed, only a droplet of sap between them, and they fall together, periodically slamming  and banging against each other as they do. They circle each other in a never ending dance, each bang and crash only pushing the other closer to falling out of orbit the small string of sap stretching far thinner than it was ever meant to. They reach the ground, as all must, and time moves on. The sap remains, but now it feels more like a prison than a means to a mend. Time passes, as it always does, and a tree grows from the two seeds. The tree is beautiful, with flowers of orange, yellow, and blue. The sap has long since degraded, but the tree stands tall. The seeds move on. A few come to settle on your thighs, resting  between the ridges of your scars, and you rise from a hole which resembled the grave, a million screams of despair echoing in your mind until it plateaus into a much more familiar despar. All is quiet and you stay afloat. You come across the wall, smokey from far away, but much too solid to breach. You reach out one desperate hand, fingers grasping at wisps of gray smoke until the wisps harden into cold  stone. You’ve never seen it before but you know this wall, you can’t remember a time when its soft division wasn’t there to keep you inside. You know there is no escape. Instead you keep wandering, and your eyes grow damp with the promise of tears. The smoke is no thicker than before, but it lingers, painting every beautiful sprout, or moss covered log with a bit of its lonely despair. You’re scared like you’ve never been before, because the fog is everywhere now, and you can’t see a way out. You can’t see. So you walk into the lake, and you open your eyes.