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A 19 year old girl rolls over on her dorm bed as her alarm blares. Her phone is on the floor, knocked off of the bed. Her roommate has already gotten up for the day and is not in the room. The girl groans and looks out the window at the bleak scene below. A concrete courtyard and the other wing of the modern building stares back at her. The sun is shining on her roommates’ walls and she takes in its beauty for a second before the panic sets in. She has a final tomorrow, and today is her last chance to study. She jumps out of bed but her foot gets caught on the ottoman next to her bed. She falls backwards, sinking into the floor and out of this reality.
“Would you like to swing on a star, make you better off than you are…”
The child giggles and smiles at her mother.
“I’m on top of the world, looking down on creation and the only explanation I can find…”
There is a picnic outside. The sun is shining and the grass is ever so soft and green. The beams of sunlight blind the young girl as she lays on her stomach on a blue blanket with apples strewn about the design. Plush horses are scattered around her, and the girl makes up scenarios as she plays with them. There is an Intex pool set up next to her.
“Abby, do you want a snack?” a woman walks up to her, coming from a hammock set up in the shade across the yard.
“Yessss,” responds the girl. “Can I have peanut butter crackers?”
Her head twists uncannily and she finds herself at the pond in the same backyard but she is older now. She watches the fish swim, and they start to blur as time speeds up and the seasons go by. Her grandma is in one of the visions, and then the world goes black.
She is in her grandparents’ house. The world is gray. She is standing in the corner of the room, and the subject in the bed comes into focus. It is her paternal grandmother, dying. She walks up and holds her hand. She cries as she chokes out, “I love you.” She awaits the response, but it never comes before she is whisked out of this memory and into another.
She is walking in the hallway with her three best friends after band class. They shove her folders out of her hands and walk away quickly, laughing hysterically. She laughs too, playing along as she hurriedly grabs her stuff and runs to keep up. They shove her and laugh more. She tries shoving them back to no avail. These are her friends. She believes she is laughing with them. Inside she is seething yet helpless. She trips on her best friend’s foot and falls into the concrete floor.
The girl and her brother are playing a video game with tanks. The time is midday in the summer, and they are worried about nothing more than the victory at hand. They are eating apple slices dipped in peanut butter and granola. The girl’s tank is destroyed in battle in a flash of light and fire.
The brother’s girlfriend is so nice. They are moving in together with the New Year. They are living downtown. It is so magical for them. The girl is so happy for her brother, but there is a tug in her heart that she cannot explain.
The girl sits silently as her mother talks about how wrong it is for people to be homosexual, and how the ways of the world are not the ways we are supposed to be.
She sits silently as her mother reads a devotional with her aunt in the car and they talk about how to cope with their child possibly not being saved. The mother does not know the girl does not believe anymore, and how determined she is to keep it that way.
What would happen if I chose to live to the fullest?
What would happen if I was no longer scared?
What would my fullest potential look like?
Was I even capable of that?
I would try. I would try.
I was laying on my deathbed. I was not unhappy like I imagined, or unfulfilled. I was scared, sure. But I was not regretful.
So what does it matter the choices I make?
The choices in pursuit of a perpetual fleeting emotion called happiness?
Was that emotion even real? Did it ever exist?
Would it matter if I jumped off the top of the university stadium? I know that after I jumped, in the air, I would wish for just another day to live, another second even. But it would be too late. But why did I care so much if nothing ever mattered?
Why was I given the opportunity to feel– to exist? If it meant nothing?
I did not understand, but I knew I wanted to live. Even if the only happiness I knew was the feeling of chocolate or delectable salty french fries on my tongue, or the exhilaration of a roller coaster, or the euphoria of finding a perfect song, or the fulfillment of taking care of a beloved pet. Those moments made the sadness, pain, and numbness in between worth it.
But as I was in the air, I didn’t have those moments in mind. I was looking into the faces of my mom, my dad, my brother, even my ex-best friend who abandoned me. I loved them. I LOVED them. THEY were what gave my life meaning, not some random adrenaline rush or even that perfect song. And I would be hurting them by leaving.
In that moment, I knew I could never leave.
So under my breath, into the wind and across the universe, I took it back.
I was alive. I needed people, no matter how flawed. I couldn’t hide myself away forever, scared of rejection when loneliness was the only real threat.
All those versions of me out there were merely figments of my own imagination, fragments made up so I could comfort myself in my failures. This was me, and the choices I make were always destined to be made. The universe was preordained.
My place in it was infinitely small and insignificant, but also equally as large. I was the universe experiencing itself. I mattered to me, and therefore to the universe.
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