A Wormhole To The Galaxy's Only Solitary Star - Old, ReWrite in prog

by Toph4ever

I wanted to imagine a universe in which the Star had never found her way to Earth, nor the Diaz family's home. This tale follows a certain red-hoodied individual years after the events of the show would have occurred as he journeys across dimensions to escape his broken heart and start over, inciting a fated meeting that even alternate timelines and misconceptions cannot prevent.

1: A Tale of Parting

Initial A/N: This story deals with themes of depression and suicide, if you are already deep in the throes of such things and are easily swayed by written description:

1) Seek help

2)Turn back now

If you can hold the proverbial liquor of depression, then welcome friend. This is my first fiction in quite some time, and I'm aiming to hit over 100K words with it. I enjoy creative writing and recently the show Star vs the Forces of Evil has been the primary fodder for my imagination. I wanted to imagine a world in which the titular Star Butterfly had never found her way to Earth, nor into the home of beta-protagonist Marco Diaz. Instead this first chapter explores the backstory and journeys' start of a character I have chosen to only hint at the identity of for the sake of being a dramatic prick. You should be able to make a pretty firm guess by the end of the chapter. So kick back, enjoy, and let me know what you think of my sometimes paragraph long run-on sentences. My writing reads more as stream of consciousness than concise prose *cough* occasionally *cough* in the interest of expanding on a particular image I have in mind.

Thanks for reading!

For the first time in as many years as I had digits on which to count them I was really, truly, alone in the world. Or as close to as I could ever imagine myself coming.

Rock bottom is phrase often used to describe depression, one reserved for those times one feels exquisitely, irredeemably low, but the one-dimensional sense of depth that phrase provides doesn't do justice to the full scope of the abyss embodying the myriad sensations it endeavours to describe.

The palpable, maddening awareness of stone gnashing at skin with every minute movement as you shamble, dragging blistered feet through hills of tailings named 'routine' in a desperate search for a ledge called 'a fresh start.' A ledge which you are all but convinced is a mirage devised by those who would tell you, with the authority of a decree granted power and agency by the thrones of red velvet and pale leather upon which they perch like so many pigeons, poised atop mountains of scripture and 'college learning' that frame the glacier valley through which you stumble, is the answer. They insist that you must use it hoist yourself into a position termed 'back on your feet,' which you have only ever known by the descriptions of others, as though that alone would be the end of your problems rather than the beginning of an endless uphill battle that both you and they know you will lose eventually, sliding right back down to the vicious gravel below. All the while the hypocrisy of that concept enrages and emboldens the many disparate parts of your brain waging war on each under the flags of denial and resignation via factions known by names ranging from 'we were never off them' to 'why even bother trying.'

The background noise of those stones you wade through and those which tumble around in your mind as you move slowly forward, feeling for all the world like a boulder caught in the furious rapids of a narrow river channel as you watch other people's lives rush and flow around you, mixing and mingling and slowly inching you along its bed with their violent passing as they wet your surface. Never individually possessing the velocity or trajectory to widen the cracks in your façade; the stains they leave on your surface destined only to evaporate away without leaving so much as a trace moments after cresting upon you. Depositing only the immaterial promise that the process of that weathering will someday find you polished and the better for it; always taking more of you than they give of themselves.

The feeling of panic and anxiety as your lungs fill with choking, needle-like dust drilled from a material called 'you, absent your raison d'être,' as you bore a hole far into it, down which you aim to lob your fractured heart like a live grenade; praying that when it does explode, and it will explode, you'll have thrust it deep enough that this time, unlike myriad others, you'll walk away from the blast unscathed.

There is no one word in the English language to describe the harmony such throaty chords strike; no, rock bottom is a two word ditty best strummed on the ukulele of a habit, the fiddle of a falling out, or the kalimba of disenchantment. It is too transient and inconsequential to capture the richness and depth present in the accords of true, panoptic sorrow.

The activity I was engaged in at that moment and during innumerable moments prior, in a manner that was always so raw and fresh that the sensation had become almost stale despite itself, was probably best described as willful self-petrification. An act requiring marriage of the arts of lithography and ventriloquism to create a walking, talking shell that looked and sounded very much like its creator. Inside the deceptive casing would lie a cavernous space large enough to house both the orchestra which had taken up residence in the practitioner's fissured heart, striking up those melancholy chords of emotion which would become the soundtrack to their life, and whatever remaining essence of themselves they could muster. They would shrink down to no more than a mote in order to maximize the remaining volume of that abyss, allowing their pain as much space as possible to echo and reverberate, so as to better enjoy that miserable soundscape of shadowy, composite feelings that only poetry and convoluted metaphor could do a modicum of justice.

In such a way I felt like a ghost who'd been doomed to haunt the home I had inhabited in life until I became part of the vacant structure itself; accompanied by nothing more than a playlist I had left blaring on an infinite shuffle loop just before passing, and which I was powerless to turn off. It was entitled, "Greatest Hits: Every Intrusive Thought You've Ever Had," featuring the classics, "I was never good enough," "She didn't love me from the start," and, "Why go on trying when nothing will fix this."

Each day that had passed had cracked the fascia of that carefully constructed shell of mine and exposed the raw nerves underneath just long enough for the outside world to leak in and smart them before scarring back over. This process had repeated itself ad nauseam with every step taken during my waking hours, sending those fractures radiating until finally the near constant orgy of agony that had become my existence had found me hobbling my way to a crossroads. It was one which contained an inescapable precipice looming just beyond the horizon that bridged both paths of its fork. Onlookers would have seen the towering face of that precipice's cliff as the vertical wall of a building high enough to project a live collage onto, featuring every individual instance of regret of an individual's life personified in the form of an accelerating rag-doll, flashing up on the concrete screen as it sped simultaneously through that person's mind during their gravity-assisted descent from its heights. Had anyone bothered to look up into the sky in the middle of the city on that or any other afternoon they would have seen a man perched delicately atop its roof sill. A bottle of pills rested in the hand he wasn't using to desperately clutch at the weather-beaten concrete of the ledge, as a mere question of resolve prevented him from clawing his way down either branch of his final junction. That man was me, and somewhere between edge of that apartment complex and the lethal dose of prescription medication clutched in my fist was meant to lie the portal that would finally bear me away from my suffering.

I had never considered an attempt on my own life before that day, when I had gazed long and hard into my own eyes in the mirror upon waking and, deciding that I could no longer find anything left within them worth paying the lofty price of admission each new day demanded to see, I had dragged myself up to the roof armed with nothing more than my emotional and physical exhaustion and a choice of the door I wanted to exit the world through.

There had been a string of days leading me up to that point; enough of them to construct a month if taken as they seemed to run, together, and for more than three if viewed in context of the river of time's genuine flow. All were unpleasant, and the habit I had formed of ghosting through them, taking with me not so much as a memory, made the ride through its tempestuous rapids seem all the more abridged. The only landmarks on the banks of those passing days I had made note of in the process of my transit were clustered, white-hot points of agony that wormed their way into the back of my brain and stuck under my skin like emotional botfly. Their wriggling ends poking out of gaping sores to remind me of their hideous presence with every rearward glance.

There was the time She had called me, drunk, mistaking my number for one of Her new lovers' and had managed to slur through a whole paragraph of platitudes and explicit declarations of intent before I informed Her with a dry chuckle that I had asked that She delete my number from Her phone, and proceeded to hang up and delete Her memory with a bottle.

Or the preceding occurrence during which an impassioned message had blazed across my phone screen sometime after midnight on a day I hadn't cared number or name; lighting in my chest the first fire of hope whose warmth had embraced my frigid core in months, only to feel the heat of that flame twist, flash-frozen into a thousand-pointed dagger, into my gut as I showed up on Her doorstep. I was greeted by Her downcast face, the image of which had since remained seared into my brain like a freeze-brand, and Her insistence that She'd simply caught a 24 hour bug called 'reminiscence'. The time it had taken me to drive over had been enough for that fever to break. That had been the aforementioned time I'd informed Her in no uncertain terms that I wanted to be removed from Her contacts list as completely as I'd come to realize I'd been from Her life.

However the granddaddy of them all, the monolith that loomed over the entrance to the cave from which I'd begun my withdrawal from the bright and manic rays emitted by that omnipresent sun called 'your future,' into the deepest chasms of pity and self-loathing, was the inciting incident of the charade my life had become. The day She decided after eight years of pining, a wager in the form of a kiss so risky I was worried I may actually lose my life to the gamble, a hasty confession and equally hasty reply, and two years of reciprocation that She no longer felt anything when we re-enacted those same circumstances which christened our relationship's commencement. When She had told me as much my heart had crackled with the onset of a foreboding frost, my every vein becoming brittle as glass, and every fibre of my being bracing for the impact of what was to come, hoping it wouldn't shatter me too badly.

Those hopes had been naïve and misplaced. The words 'it's over' pierced my gut like cannon fire through the belly of a scuttled ship, and I tried desperately to plug the leaks despite the rapid influx of frigid water with questions about the future we'd planned and the life we had envisioned together, words foaming from my mouth like seawater; She answered with a second volley whose rapport rang out with the finality of splintering wood and rending metal.

"There is no 'We' anymore."

With that statement She had set a course starboard and sailed out of both my room and my life as She had decided to enter them, quickly and unceremoniously.

No matter how much time, effort, or liquor I had poured into erasing Her from my mind, I could never quite smudge the spectre of Her presence all the way out. I would have Her forgotten down to that streak of teal hair that She dyed every two weeks, exactly, to keep the roots from showing through too badly; then I would find a faded strand on my pillow and there would be no dam in the world capable of stopping the flood of emotions which came roaring back.

I might have Her hold over me lessened to no more than the feeling that stupid, ever-present orange seashell necklace against my chest as we kissed, or the tone of Her sun-bronzed skin, or the scent which seemed almost to sublimate from Her as She roused next to me, ignited by the crimson beams of morning; the spectre of Her memory, however, was a vengeful one. It would always return one way or another to torment me, beating my own spirit down until it was barely clinging to my aching bones, and then naught but my searing tendons, finally knocking it loose from my hollow body entirely and chasing it in freefall through a murky sea of black thoughts and those same prescription meds.

It was the risk I had run, and ultimately the price I had paid, for letting a single woman define the majority of my formative years. I simply didn't know how to be a person without her. When I had experienced inner monologues it had always been HER voice which filled my head, and when I needed to respond to anyone it was always in a way SHE might find endearing. I had crafted my personality in such a way as to ensnare Her, but a snare built to merely catch its prey will never hold it indefinitely, and by the time of our first anniversary my lack of identity and ambition had become the first of many errant stones in our relationship's rutted road. I should have seen the split coming, but up to the end I was far too enraptured by the glory of having at last achieved my lifelong goal to bother setting myself others; while She had continued to grow I had stagnated, and that had finally led the glorious light I had spent so long admiring, craving, and finally basking in to consume me in my entirety.

I recalled all of this, nostalgic, as I sat on that raised lip at the edge of my drab downtown apartment complex's rooftop, fingering the pitted masonry as though by digging deep enough into its rigid surface I could crack free some hidden gem, some miraculous treasure, containing the answers to my problems. When it eventually became evident that none had been included during the concrete's forming many years prior, and around the time my musings had begun to fade into the crisp evening air gusting up from the streets below laden with the heavy musk of a drowsing metropolis, I mustered the courage to cast my gaze downward and realize the purpose of my ascent. To challenge the earth itself to a terminal game of chicken.

I restrained the dipping arc of my sight to a slow dive at first, allowing the windows and balconies of high-rises adjacent to mine to slip past the periphery and into my focal vision. However as the spindrifts of life, smoke and dust and trash and light, began to assert themselves in my consciousness I grew increasingly enthralled by the chaos below my dangling, beige-sneaker-clad feet. My neck began to crane of its own volition to follow the trajectory set by my eyes and, as I found myself leaning forward to allow ever more of that raging flow to enter my view, appearing for all the world as a mighty river coursing far below the glacier valley that once fed it, where I now languished in my solitude, I was slammed breathless by the crest of an incredible wave of vertigo.

The sight of vast, magnificent vista caused me to sway on my perch at the precipice of my building, and the roiling canal drew from me, as from a tributary, the first two positively incandescent realizations I'd known in time immemorial. Or at least since I'd first discovered my infatuation with Her.

First and foremost: I simply could not plunge myself into that tempest in either the literal or the figurative sense. I wholly lacked the conviction to take a step as immediate and final as leaping out to into the assembled crowd intent on surfing away from the stage of my life in Rock Star fashion. Possibly as a function of the fact that I hadn't rebuilt my spine since She ripped what little of it I'd ever possessed like a hyena from my limp carcass, possibly because flashy displays had never been my style. But I also couldn't simply rejoin that same crowd by way of the elevator shaft that loomed several floors below me, as deep and dark as the pit growing in my stomach. I had been too irreparably damaged to simply re-enter society and, even had my soul remained sound and whole, it's bustle held no wonder for me any longer; the only shaft of light within its roiling waters that had caught my attention having long since departed to shine elsewhere.

The second began fairly insignificant, dwarfed initially by the poignant glow of that former epiphany like the light of some anemic candle held against the backdrop of a beachside sunset I knew I would never be able to revisit. However it quickly grew into a raging beacon as it fed on each of the worries I'd dredged up from the sea-floor of my mind, the swirling tempest of human progress below fanning it as it swelled in volume and significance to consume my awareness.

If I could not change, something had to.

Perhaps this was what those proverbial pigeon kings had meant as they'd squawked at me from the plush thrones nestled snugly atop their parchment mountains. Change was something that you had to truly desire for yourself, and up until that moment desire of such a magnitude independent of Her was simply something I'd never experienced. I shied away from the brilliance of the realization at first and attempted to brush it off, resolute in my misery and convinced that I had finally chosen some change for myself free of Her. That being the particular tine of the fork in the road of my life which would lead me to my resting place. However the spark of that thought had taken hold of me firmly, and its rapid growth seared me to my core, forcing a fracture to grow on the surface of my granite casing as it ignited dissonance within me. For the first time in years that solitary crack spread on the face of the heavy, burdensome boulder of my soul in a way that was refreshing instead of painful, and the sights, sounds, and smells of the teeming life swirling below surged angrily up and into it, lambasting the freshly exposed stone and chiding it for so much as thinking of crumbling away into obscurity, blowing away my misery in the process.

The combined and positively elemental force of that searing flame and quenching water toppled my already shaky, dizzied form from the ledge I was perched upon and for a moment I beached hard on time's sharp bank, suspended in mid-air as the sensation of falling took full grasp of me and I truly feared I had toppled the wrong way; that the sudden, intense flash of my will had decided my fate for me in a twist of irony entirely to cruel to be legitimate. However that moment passed as quickly as it had begun, not even leaving me a chance to reflect further on my life or my mistakes. Time's currents wrenched me back into the flow of their stream and I cut a red-hooded streak through the pale orange dusk as I slammed vertebrae-first into the building's hard shingled ceiling, reminding myself of a backbone I'd forgotten, pill bottle leaping from my hand and out into the void of space I'd intended my body to occupy moments earlier. I scrambled to my feet and leaned over the ledge, praying it didn't hit anyone as it fell, just in time to watch it explode on the street innumerable stories below between passing cars, and send its contents scattering to the four winds and to the street drains where they would numb the pain of sewer rats in place of that of my existence.

I quickly ducked my head under the level of the roof's lip out of the insane fear that one of the stray drops of water helping comprise that surging brook so far below my feet might strain their eyes skyward and recognize a human figure atop one of the stone trees lining its shores. They might have, perhaps, resolved to call the police, mistaking accident for malintent, which would have been a debacle that I neither wanted nor was equipped to handle.

I rocked rearward, crouched on my heels, and fell to my backside; sitting on shaking hands as I craned my head in the direction of the clouds to which I was currently so incredibly much closer than any of the other droplets flowing through the river of that city. I could feel a tangible desire to evaporate into them, seeking the freedom which seemed so near and promised to alleviate my heartache despite remaining, in cruel reality, so unbelievably far beyond my grasp. I took one of them out from under me and reached my quaking palm up to the sky, feeling all of the tumultuous emotions and thoughts churning in my brain begin to crystalize into a form all but corporeal as they sedimented with my settling heartrate. I turned that knot of sentiment around in my head like something tangible, inspecting it for flaws or defects; finding instead the perfect encapsulation of what for so long I had never known I'd needed, but had craved desperately, unable to give that desire any name other than the emptiness I'd filled with Her warmth. An independent notion entirely of my own design; an individual aspiration, unfettered by the wills and whims of my peers and the object of my pining. I repeated it to myself under my breath, like a sacred oath, just to make sure it sounded as perfectly correct released to the air and played back by the wind in my ears as in my mind, its eruption from my lips flattened by an utter lack of any surface so high up to reflect or distort the sound.

"I want to create a change."

As my brain processed the syllables borne to it by the gramophone of the twilight air, my own raspy voice the first it had been asked to process in days, I felt the gem, the crystal of that concept, grow even larger inside me; I could see it so clearly that the feeling had begun to take on form in some miraculous act of synesthesia. Crescent shaped, crisscrossed with facets that divided it into silhouettes resemblant of valleys and caters; when gazed upon with the mind's eye it barked back all the hues of burnished onyx. Its lustre was dull, but to merely term it as such didn't do it a measure of justice. It was as if someone had cut a waxing moon from obsidian and then, by some arcane process, distilled the gleam away from it.

It wasn't just black, it was carbon black.

It was Vantablack.

It was a rugged void that consumed all light and heat and life around it.

A black hole with no end to its event horizon.

The vehicle of the upheaval I sought.

I reached out with my mind, closing my eyes, and curled my fingers around the empty air where I could envision it hanging, repeating again my newfound mantra, my monks' 'Ohm,' to the void of the growing darkness.

"I want to MAKE A CHANGE!"

The words differed slightly that time, but the soul of them untouched; with that admission, given warmth and luminance and volition, spurred on by the entire weight of my aching heart, I felt something materialize in my hand. Upon gingerly opening my eyes I saw what appeared to be a pair of shears nestled there. Platinum-gold blades embossed with my name and handles carved as if directly from that jewel I'd seen in my mind's eye greeted me; they were same lustreless matte stone, except cut down to so thin a cross-section that the light of the setting sun as I held them aloft appeared to pass through as a haze, brightening the material and giving it an off-purple hue. They seemed almost to vibrate as I suspended them there, and I felt the song they discharged, strange yet familiar, course down the tendons of my arm as though they were the strings of a guitar. They quivered as I drew them nearer to me and placed my fingers in the angular grips, disbelieving my own senses, as protrusions the same shape as that crescent gem, which jutted from the grip's inner face, clasped against my fingers like those of a lover, gently but firmly locking them into place.

It felt like the item had been crafted especially for me, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say of me. I could feel every ounce of longing that had poured forth from my heart fuming lethargically from the edges of the closed blades. I acutely understood their desire to rend holes in anything in their path, up to and including the fabric of reality itself, to leave the whole of this world behind to start afresh.

Holding them there in my hand they felt increasingly, with the ticking by of each passing second, like something that had no business being on this earth. A sentiment to which I could relate.

However the longer I stood there, captivated by the nostalgic song they whispered and the faint smell of ozone rising from blades which seemed to part the very air before them, the more I got the feeling that they were calling me home and it was in fact I who had been misplaced, cast away into this city I once thought I knew, and which had begun feeling more and more foreign in direct proportion to the scissors' growing familiarity.

It was almost as if I could hear them calling to me, begging me to tear a rift in the atmosphere before me and step through, first seductively whispering and then growing in volume and intensity:

"You were so ready to throw your life away moments ago, why not take this chance and do something a little crazy?"

"Your pain drove you clear through madness and out the other side, it earned you this opportunity."

"Use us, cut away your baggage and cast it to the void."

"REND. THE. SKY."

The voices rang out in my mind at once separately and simultaneously as I silently questioned my sanity, called up as phantoms from the vibrations traversing my arm from the curled fist gripping those dark handles; a tactile earworm that consumed my consciousness and blurred my vision upon receipt. I parted the blades, compelled, the acrid aroma of ozone growing stronger as I did so. I held them in front of my torso, arm stiff with uncertainty and trepidation, hand shaking in anticipation.

Their thrumming all but ceased as I snapped the blades closed once again on the emptiness to my anterior. I drew the scissors back towards me, feeling no catching on nor transformation of the space they had just occupied in the process, and desperately searched for any sign that they had nicked the chains binding me to this world. The air before me, stubbornly, remained unchanged.

I felt instantly and overwhelmingly disappointed, of course something as stupid as trying to cut the air hadn't worked. These were just scissors, perhaps not even that. Maybe I was imagining the whole thing. Maybe I'd already taken that bottle of pills I'd just watched fall sometime between my ascent of the long staircase leading to the roof's door, whose rusted lock had broken with miraculous ease, and balancing myself on the razor's edge separating the platform on which I now stood from the vacuous space beyond. Maybe I had misplaced that memory somewhere in the haze of my mind, inventing this insane scenario as my dying hallucination.

In anger I drew back my arm and felt that same urge for change, to be something somewhere, anywhere, other than then and there, well up from deep inside my gut again, this time stronger than ever before; only cold and hard and toxic in place of its previously comforting warmth. I focused all of that pain and displeasure into my shoulder muscles and hurled the scissors, feeling them begin to resonate again as they cleared the tips of my fingers, casting them in a long parabolic arc across the rooftop. They made it a few yards, spinning end over end once, twice, thrice, before the centrifugal force generated by their rotation flung them open mid-flight and they jammed into something mid-air, one of the blades sticking suddenly as the other hung limply, swinging until suspended perpendicular to it.

I started at the sight of their sudden stoppage, but began to approach them slowly after a time, transfixed and emboldened by new hope that the change I had envisioned hadn't been imagined. I reached out to grasp them, brushing the edge of one of the handles as I did so, which caused it to slip down through the air a few inches and emit a shrill screech somewhere between the twisting, shearing cacophony of a car wreck and tearing cloth. In their wake something that I could describe with no words other than a swirling 'rift' of sorts with the same coloration and glossless appearance of the scissors' handles jutting out of nothing directly at its base like the pull of some cruel, draconian zipper and the crescent crystal I'd envisioned earlier was produced by the action. I paced behind the strange apparition, curious, but could see no evidence of the blade sticking through, nor any sign that something was there for them to even stick in. From the back the rift simply appeared as a differential patch of air, like a heat haze or the dull sheen of a mirage on a road. The sun behind it a flashlight pressed business-end-first to the skin of space-time, illuminating from below the more opaque tissue of an old, adjacent scar.

I paced back around scissor-side, clasped the handle of the lodged blade firmly, and pulled downward with as much force as I could muster. My heart, having forgotten my desire for escape once more, was filled to bursting with a renewed sense of confusion and amazement, but upon reefing downwards I found that the blade would not budge an inch.

Thinking back on what I had done while throwing them initially I tried my best to recreate those physical conditions, rationalizing that the reason I couldn't shift them had something to do with my leverage or angle of attack. I tried cocking my arm back and slamming it down, open-palmed, on the handle to see if it was the motion of my throw which had enabled the scissors' feat. However I was met only with searing pain as the unforgiving grip bit into the flesh of my palm. After shaking my hand for a moment to clear the sensation I attempted yanking, pulling, pushing, and even jumping on the blades, but none of my efforts showed any signs of dislodging them.

Having exhausted all other options I deemed sane, I decided to rule out the only other variable I'd left untested, which was a factor that would not have mattered in the solution of any problem in my life I had encountered up to that instant. I stood back and summoned from deep in my gut that desire for escape. The desire to incite change in my life.

As I allowed the feelings' strength to snowball inside my chest, picking up velocity and traction as it sucked in the pieces of the experiences I had been mulling over, I watched the scissors from the corner of my eye. I was intensely wary that I would miss something important if I didn't, no matter how utterly foolish all of this seemed. This turned out to be serendipitous, because as the intensity of the swirling squall of my emotions reached a fever pitch I saw the blade slip down again, ever so slightly.

This thing responded to intent.

Maintaining the emotional whirlwind inside myself and feeling, all over again, like I was mentally unstable (which, given that I had been on the verge of suicide moments prior, was likely a fair assessment) I grasped the handle of the blade lodged in the sky before me, and drew it down in a smooth arc.

This time I was met with less than no resistance, the blade seeming to pull me with it as it traced a glistening curve and left behind a grotesque wound oozing black and silver swirls of what could have been anything from muddy pitch to the lifeblood of the universe. I felt that gash call out to me as I retracted the scissors once more and closed them in my hand, feeling them lock shut with a firm snap that had a certain familiar finality to it, and stepped hesitantly towards the tear I had made in the rapidly darkening sky over my home. I could feel a tangible pull emanating from it as I drew nearer and paused for a second, questioning whether I should approach further with nothing but the clothes on my back and the contents of my pockets. In the end, however, curiosity got the better of common sense and I shuffled closer, halving the distance once, then twice, and finally a third time as I drew so near I could feel its eddying currents tug on every hair that clung to my body. I was standing parallel to it as you would a mirror, and had I been able to make out a reflection within its surface I would likely have seen a striking expression blending the best parts of curiosity and abject terror displayed in my once lifeless eyes, the likes of which the 'me' of mere hours prior could never have imagined making again.

The small part of my brain that was still rational voiced its qualms once more, but was quickly drowned out by the crowd of other, once dissonant factions chanting 'Do it!' like an ecstatic crowd at a frat party about to watch someone jump from the roof of the house into a backyard pool, or perform a particularly spectacular keg-stand. I reached out to its surface, fully prepared for it to shock, cut, or otherwise maim me, but all I was met with was a comforting warmth as my hand slipped through, which was all the poof I needed. This frightful dimensional sink-hole before me had not been part of my previous crossroads, but it had opened up at my feet by either happenstance or by fate, and in doing so had provided me with an out of the sort that I could have never before imagined. In a land of certain, literal dead ends this was my only unknown. My only chance for salvation.

I steeled myself, drew in a sharp breath, and closed my eyes, stepping forward and merging the red hoodie wrapping my torso and the earthy brown jeans encasing my legs with the blackness garnishing the portal's surface; giving myself over to oblivion.