When you've been a few feet away from the eternal void, you'd do anything to escape the well of inky blackness that threatens to make you as insignificant as the things that never happened, the things that were nothing more than wishes in the back of imaginative minds. That's where I went for what felt like a lifetime, hung in space above that gaping hole in the universe that threatened to suck me in and slosh me around like water in a toilet bowl. I was suspended long enough that I finally made peace with it. When I did, I grasped that the meaning of life was whatever was in front of me. In the blackness, I could see universes stacked upon universes, dragons fighting knights, and romances sweep in for a summer before dying on autumn's first breezes. I saw life.

When Jake pulled me back into the party, it was like being thrust back into the prison of Earth and all its mortal fallacies. There was the youth following the rhythm of their bodies, the smell of beer hanging in the air, and gossip floating in whispers about things that didn't matter. Never mattered. I begged Jake to send me back at once, screaming in my surprisingly hoarse voice that I didn't want to be here anymore. The crowd turned to look at me, their faces agape with a shock I'd never remembered seeing before. There were cries of "is that you Drew?" and "you look old?". Of course, I was old. How could I possibly be young? Who would want to be?

I couldn't fault them for their lack of understanding. Life was a spectrum of knowledge, and only towards the natural end did you understand the necessity of death, that there was a special quality to rest. You'd seen the cycles of life and had come to understand that everything that's happening now has happened before in a different form. In this way it all became boring. The void was never boring because it always contained something new, and it did this by being nothing at all.

Jake put me behind his back again. I smiled.

r/StoriesToThinkAbout