Intellect

Prologue

Cherish every moment. When walking through endless mazes of tall trees and lurking wildlife, I've come to find that those three words strike a powerful meaning. With every nerve running under my skin, I heighten my senses with the flowing life of the forests to cherish it all. I focus on the smallest of details to make sure that everything I know is real.

Like a blurred predator among the thick branches of withered trees, it's hard to tell the difference between reality and my complex imagination. Some situations I find myself in are much more than I've expected to experience at my young age, and many are more painful than good. When I attempt to remember them, though, is when I question if they are something similar to my dreams. I grieve that some small detail is missed and altered to be something else, or the entire memory is only another piece to my intricate mind puzzle.
As I continue to think of these possibilities, I find myself losing focus of regular life. At first, my senses were sharpened to analyze my surroundings more clearly, but now they're melting apart and falling into an abyss; my thoughts go with them. My body begins to feel numb, my hearing comes to an end, and my eyes start to close. I let myself sink within my bedsheets to shut down my late-night contemplating.

The wrenching sound of my ceiling fan is no longer there, and the small hints of blinking lights that signal the technology in the darkened room fade away. I let myself drift off into a sleeping state, but I end up going somewhere else within my mind. While I'm seemingly dreaming in the real world, I slip into a different one within a memory. Knowing my mind is unpredictable, I await what I might see in a few moments and give plenty of time to prepare. As my consciousness completely gathers the memory, I expect to see something other than pitch black. Instead, I begin to hear a voice.
Faint at first, the echoing sound is easy to identify as a female person. Continuing to listen, I find the voice is familiar. A friend I used to know a few years back before all of the chaos began. Winter. My guesses morph into facts when I see the young girl walk toward me. With every footstep an echo, I see that I'm within a room where the walls are unable to be found. With Winter right in front of me, my focuses aren't on the surroundings much longer.

"Xavier."

Winter speaks my name in a soft tone but means to be serious. Her clothes are just as bright as she used to be. The young girl wears a light, white jacket with white jeans to match her style. Her shirt has a small hint of a bright yellow, with a small logo imprinted within the top left corner, unreadable from the jacket covering it.

I look up to meet her eyes. Her facial structure is almost perfect, in addition to the bright blue eyes and curly blonde hair that mark her appearance as her own. We stand about five feet from each other, standing in caution and slowly feeding off the safety of being close to a friend I cared highly about. Although my ground is steady, she catches me off guard with the sharpness of her voice.
"Xavier," she repeats. "You look uneasy. Would you like another metaphor to clear your head?" My brain copies her to match her real identity in every sense. Although I'm aware she's not there, I feed into my imagination as I accept her presence.
"Sure," I mumble, putting in more effort to speak than usual. With my answer registered, the events play out the same way they did years ago. Winter steps forward slightly and reaches into her jacket pocket to pull a small cardboard box that fits within the palm of her hand. Showcasing the brown box, the word eternal is labeled on the top in bold lettering. I look up to find her eyes again. She does the same before she speaks again.

"This is a cardboard box," she displays, "It is inside this dark room holding nothing but us, with no doors to lead you out." Her words sound just like what they would in reality, and it makes me slightly uneasy. Knowing that my mind has recorded so much without my knowledge is terrifying.

"Yeah, I see that," I say. She steps back and simply stands there, staring at me in silence. Several moments pass by, and nothing changes. Maybe I was wrong to believe my mind had recorded everything. "Are you going to tell me what's inside?" I ask.

"Nope!" Winter speaks up, quick to answer. I stare at her with an odd look, questioning what her point is. I attempt to remind myself of what this memory is, what happens next, but I realize that I can't remember. The only thing that can remember is my mind, and I'm starting to believe I don't have control over it.

"I can't know?" I question.
"Nope, you can't," she states.

"Is there any way I can open it to find out? It's the only thing I can do here," I continue. She pauses for a moment to think, but it looks as if she already knows her answer.

"Maybe. It depends. Do you have the key?" Winter asks. I check my pockets to see if I'd given myself this key, and I come empty-handed. I look up and curiously continue the conversation.

"I'm afraid not," I stutter. She starts to laugh, and instead of the usual feeling of comfort, I start to shiver.

"The key isn't physical, smart one," Winter scoffs.
"What do you mean?" I continue to question.

"It's mental," she states. I pause in confusion, but then gasp at a small realization. I take myself back to understand where I am; within my mind, reliving a memory, and searching for a key to a small box that doesn't exist. I calibrate what she means when she states the key is something my mind holds when everything that occurs at this moment is from my mind. Bringing myself to believe after so long that my thoughts are a maze to get lost within, I find that a key is just as difficult to search for.

"How would I find this key?" I attempt to ask, although I doubt she'll give me any real answers. She surprises me when she gives me a hint, only to find the single point she'll get across.

"That's something you'll have to figure out on your own," Winter admits. "Your mind is vast, and you need to take control of it. As of the moment, it looks like it has control over you. What lies within this box is a truth that you'll never know unless you find a way to tame yourself."

It doesn't take much longer before I understand I won't get anything else out of her. I make another daring attempt to remember what happens after, but I still can't make any connections. My memories have begun to fade ever since I acquired them, and they continue to until I can only grasp a few hints of each one. This fact showcases itself as she begins to back away from me until she is nothing but another blurry figure in this vast room. Remembering her last words in a memory that seemingly ends here, I take the metaphor given as a clue to solving my never-ending anxiety.

As Winter fades out of my line of sight, I find myself in the same position I was when this started. Instead of falling into a different memory, I make due with what she had told me, and I begin to drift asleep. The only thing that stops me from completely falling out of my senses is that she didn't tell me anything. This was all a fake, all something made up, and yet I believed every word. She was so surreal that I couldn't tell the difference. My mind could create an entirely different world, and I'd believe it to be a reality. I play games against myself and I don't fully realize it until much later. That's when I learn the truth within a box locked against my own will.
My worst enemy is myself.