text: An alarm screeches as a boy groans at the thought of another day of thoughts. The boy reluctantly gets out of bed to a particularly bland world. Thoughts of everything that could go wrong rush the boy’s head as he gets ready for school. While he’s getting ready, the boy notices his house is unusually empty but he assumes everyone left early. The boy grabs his favorite cereal only to notice it doesn’t taste as good as he remembers. Puzzled, the boy assumes the cereal is out of date. The boy is then washed over by a strange wave of deja vu but chooses to ignore it as he doesn’t know why or where it came from. As the boy gets ready to walk to school, he puts in his earbuds and puts on his favorite song just to get annoyed by how repetitive and boring it now seems to sound. The boy also realized that the world which used to be vibrant and beautiful has now turned an ugly shade of gray. He ignores it as it’s been a constant trend for once beautiful things to turn gray and depressing. The boy then turns his music up and makes his way to school, head down, kicking rocks, trying to distract himself from invading thoughts and the sad, monotonous reality of his daily life. As he walks, he notices the air has a strange scent like it’s about to rain but he sees no clouds and the sky is strangely gray. While walking, the boy looks up and sees an odd shape in the road ahead, while all these abnormal experiences keep happening he realizes he hasn’t seen a single car or another person. As he approaches the strange shape he saw he can feel the air gradually get colder and the world around him starts to get darker. When the boy gets close enough he can see that the shape is missing a hexagon-shaped section in the road, seemingly leading to nothing. The hole doesn’t seem to have much below it either as if it was just a tile of the world that has been removed. The sight of the hole heightens the boy’s senses allowing him to notice the slight but constantly increasing distortion in his music but not the sounds of the rest of the world as there is no sound other than the music coming from his earbuds, not even his footsteps. Realizing this, the boy screams in an attempt to make any noise other than the now extremely distorted music coming from his headphones. In an attempt to pause or somehow stop the music, the boy rips out the cords leading to his earbuds but that doesn’t stop it. The boy then scratches at his ears to make the noises he once called music stop. His earbuds fall to the ground not making a sound but the music continues playing. Terrified, the boy sprints from the ungodly hole as to make it stop. The more he distances himself from the hole, the more he can hear. First, his heart pounding in his chest. Then, his breathing which is heavy and ragged. Finally, his feet stomping on the asphalt road. The boy is petrified but works up the courage to look back. As he does, he sees more hexagon-shaped holes appear, swallowing buildings whole, buildings where loved ones lived, buildings where he had many great memories, buildings where he met friends and spent time with family. The boy keeps running, as a single tear rolls down his cheek, quickly swept away by the wind that is now raging around him. Lightning crashes and thunder booms but still nothing in the sky, not even a cloud, still a constant gray except for the occasional flash of white in place of lightning. Still looking back at the destruction behind him, the boy is hit with another wave of deja vu, forcing him to whip his head back to see where he’s going. When his eyes focus on the path ahead the boy realizes there is none. Nothing. Everything ahead of him is gone, swallowed into the ever-growing void that’s spreading like a plague, consuming everything he loved. Cornered inches from falling into the dark abyss, the boy looks back to where he just ran from, seeing he doesn’t have much time left as the unexplainable corruption spreads closer to him. Realizing he has nowhere to go, the boy closes his eyes, calms his breathing, and relaxes his body. With the boy’s body at ease, he is allowed to have a free mind and think. The boy thinks for what feels like years, decades, centuries, almost like a meditative state. A constant stream of thoughts, unbroken and never wavering. Thoughts of life, past traumas, horrors from his childhood, but they weren’t all bad. The boy also thought back to the great times with friends and family, not many but golden moments. At that moment, the boy knew what he had to do. As he opened his eyes, he saw every single moment he just thought about suspended in the air on geometric platforms, scattered in the newly formed void. Every good and bad moment in his life was displayed in front of him. A small gap in the chaos appeared ahead of him, clarity and freedom from his past that haunts him. The boy took one more deep breath and sprinted full speed at the gap, faster than he’s ever run. While running, the platforms containing his past, that shaped him, that made him who he is today, start blinking out of existence. As he reaches the end of what’s left of his world, he sees only one platform, positioned right in front of him. A pill bottle with a weathered label, all he can read from it is the letters, “Zol..”. The boy couldn’t make out any more from it as he had to look at the ground beneath him and the edge rapidly approaching. When the boy reaches the edge, time seems to stop for just a moment as he is blasted by emotions. Anger, fear, joy, sadness, disgust, all felt in a split second and quickly fading. No longer being bound by feelings or memories, the boy leaps into the void. While he’s falling, the boy feels nothing but is overwhelmed by a feeling he never felt before, an unexplainable feeling of freedom from the stress and pressure of life. Finally free, finally at peace. As the rest of the world fades and the boy falls into the endless abyss, darkness envelops his vision until he can no longer see anything but pitch black. Then as if nothing happened, the boy opens his eyes, back in bed, back in his house, back in the same old world he left the night before. He thinks to himself,” Ugh, another one, must’ve forgot my pills last night.” The boy then reaches over to his bedside table and grabs a pill bottle with a weathered label. As he takes the pill, he looks out his window. Just as he swallows the pill, the world brightens and becomes almost over saturated in color. Also in the back of his mind, another hexagon-shaped hole evaporates leaving a hopeless void in its place. But most importantly, the dreams go away and the boy’s mind goes numb once again...