Straight On Til' Mourning

XIV.

When she awoke, she was facing a set of doorways cut in stone.

The markings were simple. One read LIFE and the other read DEATH. Various inscriptions joined and twisted across the two frames. The floor itself was thick with ivy. To her back was emptiness, a vast black hollow of nothing. Around her, grey stone walls rose formidable and tall.

A voice – the voice from the desert – reached into her head, through the pockets of her consciousness. "Make your choice," it said, "and remember that of the two doors, only one will you face again."

"Is that it?" Kirsten reached towards one knob, then retracted her hand. "This must be it."

The hallucinations had burdened her, and now the heaviness sponged off her shoulders. She straightened to face the weight of her decisions.

Life meant going back to her mother, moving to Los Angelos, and learning to exist without her sisters.

Death meant silence. It meant freedom from her grief and it meant the end of an existence she had long considered meaningless.

One choice would leave her mother completely alone; the other would cosign her to months and years of figuring out who she was, Kirsten, independent.

She scraped her feet against the floor. Her palms and the inside of her arms trickled hot sweat. Anxiety sent cold terror in an icy rush down her spine. It hurt, to contemplate this. It hurt to even realize that she had a choice.

Kirsten stared between the two signs until her indecision had been replaced by a calculating sense of loss – whichever she choose, wherever she went, she would go forth missing something.

Reaching out a hand that did not feel like her own, she grasped one knob. Twisted. And stumbled into a void fraught with constellations and faint murmured voices.