The door opened slowly shedding light into the deep abyss that lay across my eyes, once so wide open, now squinting against the harsh glare. The gaze spanned across time, and said more in that brief glance than the thousand words that had been abundantly sown across the many days of constant apology. Apology too much, too late. He knew it now, as I had known it for years that the time of departure had come. We said not a word, just gazing steadily across what are now only memories of a time spent, a time lost, and a time regained from our denial.

The stars shifted, opening a veil to span ages across the galaxies for all to see. Those few who looked at all. The bitter cold brought my breath up in gasps of crystalline pallor, and almost I could use the distorted reflection to see the life I had left behind, and the life I had left before me. The past. The future. The stars. I looked and saw nothing but the bleak emptiness around me, this ever-enclosing darkness, these ever-dreary dreams. In waiting for the future to become a hope, I lost the present and lost myself. I opened the door to the ship, and became as the stars, burning in my agony to explode into the darkness of the universe, brightly lit from above and below.

What are these thoughts? What are these feelings that stir within me, that quicken as I quicken to the thoughts that dwell below this seething surface. The anger released becomes another vent of ripped earth spilling forth its irritated tissue. It covers the entire landscape, saturating and devouring in the same instance, but leaving nothing unscathed.

We walk, we dream, and discover the substances that would make us who we are. Examining them, we fail to examine ourselves in our entirety, and fail to find ourselves at all. What drives a person to madness but the constant quest for knowledge that cannot be found beneath the surface, cannot be found at all, but leave us with only more questions unanswered?

I hunger, but what I feed on betrays my body, betrays my heart and I am left with only denial. But to what end? I sleep and the darkness comes, but the darkness never left. I dream but cannot remember what I dream. I work but do not know what I work toward. These steps that all must walk, these steps that are supposed to bring us closer to truth? Closer to the answer that will leave me satisfied? I can do nothing more but keep searching for a truth that may not exist, but without it, would my life be so much emptier.