Restart

Endings and Beginnings

    Being a high schooler was one of the hardest things I had to do. Trying to pass my classes and not seem like an absolute weirdo to my classmates after everyone witnesses my body writhing on the ground like a snake with its head chopped off. I had a future in mind and a life to fulfill... but slowly, it was all falling apart. Not so quickly, yet in the blink of an eye, it all vanished.

       I felt so off that day, walking into my French class as usual, but the air was tainted with something strange. I had sat down at my desk in the corner of the room, alone and isolated from everyone. It was my favorite spot to be at, where no one could endlessly stare at me without craning their necks and hopefully straining themselves. I had blanked off into my own little world as the teacher had walked in, shouting her boring, tasteless announcement as she always did. She was pretty attractive for her age; her smooth wrinkled face had aged well with the tight form of her body. She seemed like someone who had taken good care of her skin throughout the years.

       I tried to focus somewhat on my surroundings, but my mind wandered further away from reality. Something was not quite right. Something was not quite the same.

       I was tired from not getting enough sleep, which I assumed was why things had seemed just a little bit off, a little bit slow. A bell rang soon after, and my head stayed glued to its position, my eyes fixed on the grounded sketchings in the desktop. Everyone pulled out papers and pencils as the teacher began barking out instructions for the day, but my head was elsewhere, on another planet in another galaxy. It was getting more challenging for me to see what was in front of me and not get lost in the imaginary world in my head, a world that I knew would never become real. My vision had begun to grow foggy and disoriented, and the images of my schoolmates around me began to look less and less accurate. The next thing I knew, our older, wrinkled French teacher turned to the class and yelled, "Nous avons fini!" Then, she repeated something in her thick French accent, "We are finished!"

       She flicked the lights off, turned on the movie, and sat down on a stool. As soon as the rays filtered into blackness, a sharp, stabbing pain ran through the back of my head. It felt as though someone was trying to rip through my scalp to grasp my brain within their grimy hands. My sight was trying to hold firm, but I was beginning to lose grasp of the life around me. It felt as though the world were moving, one blink at a time. The movie was going by, one blink after the other.

       Blink – a lady on the screen was talking to someone on the side of the road.

       Blink – the same woman was standing in a worn-out building all alone.

       Blink – I heard a harsh whisper that sounded something like, "Shhh! Can you not do this right now?!"

       A bright light flashed against my glazed-over eyes, and a roar of sound echoed in my mute ears. I could have sworn the teacher had rushed to turn the lights back on, and I saw a figure of a body standing before me, but nothing was clicking in my head, and the images were more fuzzy than clear.

       The tan coloring of the surface in front of me was soon the only thing I could see in the brightness as my cranium abruptly slammed into it. I heard a crack, which I assumed was me, and felt a warmth embrace my soul. "Again." That was all I could think before I lost myself.

       With a burst of energy, and in nothing but a split second, I was surrounded by... nothing. Everything was gone as if the never-ending shadows swallowed the world itself.

       Everything was black, yet I didn't quite register it as unconsciousness. I could see in this blackness, and I could breathe in this blackness. There was no ground, yet I was not falling. I was out of my world, out of existence: no light, no sound, no life but me.