Everyone’s been trying to find me, yet I’ve been looking for a place to breathe. I’m always searching behind me—always searching for an exit to leave.
The words rolled off my tongue like a song or a chant. I’d been chasing and closing in on a dream, while everyone had been trying to change me. I rearranged myself to fit their views, but I only seemed to feel myself drift further downwards. I just needed to get away from this place, to fly high into outer space rather than change. The question was, however, if anyone would wait for me.
The day it happened, it felt like I was floating. The world seemed to pause—to cave in on itself. The pressure from relationships, jobs, and money faded into nothing. The constant journey of finding myself on my own and the panic from trying to change myself to make others happy seemed to be the least of my worries.
My mind finally stopped. My entire body sank straight down towards the center of Earth, falling through layers of the world that held me down.
I reached the edge of the universe, completely unscathed by the scorching heat of the Earth’s core. I floated through space, gazing at shimmering stars around me. The quiet emptiness of my surroundings gave me peace instead of panic. The world—my world, the one I’d lived in all my life—seemed to no longer matter. No one could find me here, sitting in nothingness. All of the heart-sinkening fear, the panic attacks, the nightmares in my sleep and in real life, I realized how it never mattered as much as I had made it.
Relationships weren’t mine to control. If someone left, they left. If it wasn’t my choice, why let it consume me? If I allowed people to change me, then was I ever really, truly living?
I’d bent myself, damaged myself, and scarred myself to be enough, but now I understood that it was me holding myself down. I saw my life clearly for the first time, and yet I still didn’t want to go back home. I couldn’t. The peace held me back.
The heart monitor’s flatline suddenly rang out, and my heart sank nonetheless. Cries echoed throughout my head, and I could feel a heavy, pounding set of hands on my chest. I’d lived a life of silence, stress, and compliance, all for me to realize now, floating here, that it never mattered.
Still, it gave me peace as my floating specter in space shimmered one last time before disappearing completely, not returning home, but going to a place where dreamers dreamed.
