Event Horizon

Chapter 6

It has been a while since you've slept on a different bed. Tonight, you had a dream; the details fall like sand through your fingers but you're caressing the grain left in your palm.

The stars around you shone. The air was mild and cool. From the outside of your window, you saw your planet Earth. It looked like a little blue ball suspended in nowhere. You watched as you slowly drifted away, further, further, and further from the sole world you knew.

The Earth became so small. Your hometown of East Waterbridge, even smaller. It becomes a small dot, like a needle-hole poked into a curtain. Through the hole was every worldly possession, concern, friend, and enemy that occurred to you; it almost looked like you could squish it all flat.

For a moment, you had forgotten where Cairnerith was. Those great masses of land; no more than a flash in the eyeshot. Their messages on TV; just a footnote in the back of your head. All those guns and bullets that tried to protect it from itself looked like no more than a mote of dust to a voyeur from space.

From there, it became so impossibly tiny. You thought about an old chemistry unit; you fit on a chart- your entire world and you, on a list of about 100. It's always made sense but you're only starting to see it now. You thought about the blood spilt, the souls extinguished, the hatred, bred between the imaginary lines drawn across a soil you could no longer see. All for a fraction of a blue drop in the waters of the great black sea.

Can you hear the knocking? The hands of a girl you'd promised to remember hit the white-painted door, again and again, again and again. There was a door chime; you maybe built a cage around it or you never recalled her using it anyway. She's humming a song of solace, but the orchestra in her voice had no bells to ring. The blue drop disappears, leaving no ripples.

And yet, the stars around you shone.

You're tired and your sleep last night was awful.