text: The song, "" by Petit Biscuit basically forced me to write this: &#x200B; Your wife is on her deathbed and the doctors say she hasn't got much time left. One day, you're sitting next to her. She's asleep, and even though you know she can't feel you there, you can't bear the thought of leaving her... until suddenly a portal opens up in the middle of the hospital room. Through it, you hear your wife's voice. One you never thought you would hear again. She says that if you come through the portal with the thing she treasured most in life she can be with you again. You can hardly believe it. Is this a hallucination? It must be. Still, you gently grab your wife's hand, which has gone frail and thin from months in a hospital bed, and slide off her wedding ring. You go through the portal and end up in a mysterious, lonely land. &#x200B; Everything in it is foreign to you. The trees have red leaves, lined in gold, and every time you see an animal, it appears as hardly anything but a shadow. You hear whispers and get a general feeling of where to go, and for the first time in almost a year, you feel hope. You believe you'll get to see her again. You journey for days, eating strange fruit that grew off those strange, impossible trees in this endless forest. Your determination never wavers, not even when you get swarmed by shadowy wolves or when you nearly fell into a pit that was so deep you could not see its bottom. You met several other travelers along the way, all of whom were in search of what they most loved. "Someone please help me! I can't find my brother! Please!" Screamed a young man in a wheelchair. He had a dog-tag around his neck and a photo crumpled in his too thin hand. "My daughter," said the woman in white. She clutched a small, pink rabbit in her hand as she spoke. "I haven't seen her in weeks... She's only four years old. I... I heard her here." "I need to find them. I need to find them... they were hurt. Where did they go?" muttered a man in a tattered shirt. Fresh burns crawled up his hands, stopping at his forearms, but he scarcely seemed to notice. He carried a doll, a plastic car, and a delicate teacup in his arms. They were the hardest obstacles to ignore, but the voice urged you on. All those who strayed off the path became lost irrevocably in the woods, and no matter what you did, they would never come back. It took weeks to finally get through the forest, and when you did, you were met with an empty sea and an alter, sitting right in the middle of it. The voice was silent, but you were determined. You... you could see *her*. You rush forward and are shocked to find that your feet do not sink through the water. It springs beneath your feet, but the eerily clear and fishless sea does not give. You reach the alter, and she is as beautiful as the day you married her. Her skin is no longer palid and grey, her body no longer a fragile skeleton under hospital sheets. You slide the ring onto her finger... And then you're back in the hospital. She is awake, only a little, and smiles at you. Did it work? Was it all a dream? Dear god, please... please don't take her away. She weakly moves her hand towards yours, and you clutch onto it like you'll die if you let go. "Sleep," she whispers. "I want you to fall asleep next to me, just like always..." She goes limp, and you notice for the first time that the hand you hold has no warmth. She was gone, and had been for hours... Her ring is gone.