You slowly open your eyes.

The first thing you see is an ethereal night sky — the purple of the stars is encased under what appears to be crystalized glass, reflecting a blue hue that envelopes the purple and creates something like a visual reverb.

You don’t know this space, but it feels familiar to you — you reach your hand out to see the shafts of light peek through your fingers.

In your small hand, you desperately try to touch the sky and grab hold of it, but your efforts are fruitless and your hand falls back down to the ground it was on before.

You feel that your palm is touching sand, but it doesn’t seem to latch to your skin.

You realize that the sand is frozen in place — its cold touch almost feels as if you’re holding onto metal.

You begin to realize that the air around you isn’t moving either — yet somehow, you’re still able to feel as if you are breathing.

Lifting your body up, your eyes gaze outward and spot the ocean — but its waves are frozen, many of them stuck upwards.

It’s as if the only thing that can move here in this spot is your own body.

You ask yourself what you should do.

You are wearing a short, yellow sundress, and nothing else — no shoes or gloves, no backpack to your name, just yourself and the cold.

You decide to wander and see if there is anything that can be found here.

As your feet touch the metallic sand, you wonder to yourself if this cold comfort is a reprieve or somewhere you’ve lost yourself into.

You stop yourself near the water, wondering if your body will mesh into it or if it will be like walking on the frosted sand you’ve been traversing on for some time.

You lean your foot gently towards it, and as your toes touch the water you realize that unlike the sand, the water does react and move around your feet.

This pleases you, as you tend to love the feeling of water around your skin, so you decide to continue forward and see where this crystalized world’s end will be.

You aren’t sure how long you’ve been walking for — at some point minutes wasted away and turned into hours, or maybe even days.

In this crystalized space, time itself doesn’t seem to flow either.

Yet after some time, you spot something shimmering in the water below — it lets out a faint, gold light, as if it’s calling your name and begging you to take hold of it.

You’re unsure if it’s because it’s the sight of something new or just a desperation for there to be meaning in this space, but you walk towards this soft light anyways.

As you get closer to it, you realize that it’s a small, crystalized shard — the glow it emanates makes the rough edges around it more apparent.

You are unsure why this is here — “did it fall from the sky above?”

Even so, you decide to take hold of it as you near it — you want to see what this object feels like and whether it feels good to touch.

As you lift the object up, you spot a face — this face is one you know well.

It’s a face you’ve seen in the mirror every day: the face of the person you are, past, present and future.

In the shard, you see that your face is crying — these are your tears, and you know they are, so you let them out yourself.

You don’t know why though. For some reason, your right cheek is becoming overflowed, but you still don’t know why.

You toss the shard in fear — you don’t want to feel these emotions, so you need to run from it.

You realize what the shard is — it’s the memory of how you felt during something you hated.

You know what the memory is — a time when you lost something important to you, cast away from it forever even though you desperately wanted to hold onto it for as long as you could.

You know that the face in that shard is the person you were during that time — the saddest part of you that you’re trying to push away for as long as you can.

You don’t want to gaze back at it, so you try to run as far away from it as you can — “anything but being there, anything.”

Yet you stop your feet shortly away from it — you hear something audible for the first time other than your voice.

It’s a small sniffle — a cry, as if a baby is calling for the return of its mother to give it love.

You don’t want to turn around, because you know you’ll have to see something you’re afraid of…but you can’t resist the sound of the voice and decide to look anyway.

You see the shard on the ground — and your own face, crying heavily, audibly begging for someone to help and save it.

You don’t know how to respond — these are things you don’t want to feel, that you don’t want to even glance at like it’s a neighbor on the street.

But you walk towards it anyways, because the person that’s crying in the shard looks so afraid — she looks so vulnerable, and so pitiable…as if all she needs is just someone to tell her everything will be okay.

You cry — you know the tears are yours, but you don’t know if they’re meant for you or her — you grab the shard and clutch it to your chest tightly.

You gently whisper to it, knowing that your words may not reach…”I’m sorry — I promise I’ll take care of you…I promise everything will be okay…so please, don’t leave me”.

You let out the tears, but now they freeze in place.

You continue clutching the shard to your chest, and slowly lay down on your side, this time letting yourself mesh with the water around you.

As the light in the space begins to fade, you gently kiss the crystal and close your eyes — your overflowing tears now mesh with the water that surrounds you, and you quietly try to fade back into sleep, hoping for this moment to end.

You open your eyes, staring at a ceiling you know is all too familiar.

Next to you, you find that you’re holding something given to you a long time ago by someone close to you.

Unsure how to process what you just experienced, but knowing you’re back in reality — you cry, desperately hoping someday that the affection you tried to give yourself will enter your own heart.

You quietly say to yourself, knowing no one will ever hear your words…

…”I just wish…even if I don’t deserve it, I…”

Til we meet again, on the starlit sea…