He only touched the other thread where it intersected his for a moment, but as a result, he spent what felt like weeks reliving that wonderfully terrible time with Maria. From that awful first date where they’d ended up back at her place despite all the odds and the manic courtship that had followed to the overdose that had taken her from him after only a month.

This was the first moment he’d had to gaze into her soft, dark eyes in almost a decade or see how infectious her crooked smile was, and it took his breath away. All he wanted to do was stop time at that perfect first moment and relive it with her forever, but instead, he was forced to take the express train straight to her grave.

Doing it for the second time somehow made everything worse. This time, he knew exactly what came next, but there was nothing he could do to stop it as each bad thing happened to them like a series of dominos.

To him, it never mattered that she was the one that had gotten him hooked, instead of the other way around, like everyone had thought when they blamed him for her death. Before Lucas had met her, he’d been a beer and weed guy, but that still hadn’t been enough to stop him from shooting up with her.

That night had ruined his whole life, but he still didn’t care. Hell, back then he hadn’t become a complete burnout yet. He’d still been in honors classes, even if he wasn’t doing any of the homework. As his teachers at the time liked to tell him, he was “squandering his potential.”

Now that he was caught in this awful memory, he could practically hear their recriminations pounding into his brain like verbal spikes.

“You need to take this more seriously!” Mr. Barker chastised.

“You can’t just expect to coast through life forever, Mr. Sharpe!” Ms. Morales said in that horribly disappointed tone that broke his heart.

It didn’t matter, though. In the grand scheme of things, if he had to choose between pulling himself up by his own bootstraps and following Maria all the way down, he was always going to choose her.

Even after she died, he couldn’t turn away. Every part of him screamed that he should, of course, but by then, he was locked in. First, he was just using, but then, after that, he turned that big, underutilized brain to its true undiscovered talent: making drugs. After that…

As suddenly as that horrible vision started. It stopped, and he was back in that office. The only difference was that his heart was broken all over again.

“Why the fuck did you make me do that,” Lucas said coldly, in a voice brimming with violence.

“I do not control your behavior, Lucas. No one but you does that,” Darius chastised him. “You chose to grasp the thread, and now you have a keener understanding of what we must do here. You and I have to explore these pivotal moments to—”

“I ain’t exploring shit with you,” Lucas swore. “You understand? Nada. Zip.”

“Well, we can’t properly cleanse your soul and get you ready for your next life until you understand everything,” the caseworker insisted.

“Cleansing me? You mean like brainwashing? Like the river Lethe and all that crap?” Lucas asked as he tried to figure out what this weirdo was getting at.

“Just so,” Darius agreed. “Though these days, it's more like a sauna. You simply relax for a few hours, let your cares melt away, and then we send you back to Earth to try again.”

“Nah, man, I ain’t doing that,” Lucas said. “I ain't letting you erase me until you get your perfect little bootlicker. So how about you just send me to heaven or hell or wherever you send the rejects, and we declare this mission accomplished?”

This time, he waved away the skein of fate they’d been studying, but he didn’t turn the lights on. Instead, a glowing scale sprang into existence, and even though it looked to be another glowing illusion when his caseworker set Lucas’s file on one side, it actually floated there in midair on one side of the balance.

“Lots of people feel that way, Mr. Sharpe,” Darius nodded. “Letting go of that sense of self can be very frightening, but no matter who you end up becoming in your next life, it will be fundamentally the same person you are now. That’s why we need to focus on your mistakes so we can—”

“I made mistakes because I was a fuck-up, okay?!” Lucas shouted, exasperated. “Case closed!”

“You aren’t a bad person, Lucas,” his caseworker said, trying and failing to offer a sympathetic expression to him. “You are much farther from hell than you are from heaven. Unfortunately, your performance leaves a good deal to be desired. We know you can do better.”

The scale seemed to agree with Darius’s assessment, for better or worse. It was just about balanced and was leaning very slightly toward the positive side.

He supposed that made sense. Even if he’d been a complete fuck-up, he’d mostly tried to help people. He hadn’t killed anyone or started shit with anyone that hadn’t started it first.

The only life he’d really ruined was his own. Well, his and many of the men and women he’d sold his crystal to on a regular basis. Even if the idea of losing himself in whatever cosmic kumbaya shit this guy was talking about didn’t repulse him, though, the last thing that Lucas was in the mood for was reopening every wound in his whole miserable life to find some sort of Catharsis.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

They went back and forth about this for days, and argued about it until Lucas completely lost track of time. They argued about it until he tried to force open a door that wasn’t there, tear down the bookshelves in the room, and flip over the desk. He had no luck with any of that, though. He was trapped like a rat.

Since time seemed infinite, and he couldn’t do anything else, eventually, after hours of resistance, Lucas started to explain and even engage. This was just another ploy on his part, though.

No matter how sincerely he might seem to be dragging his feet as he slowly came around, he had no intentions of doing any such thing. His caseworker, or angel, or whatever it was that this dude was, seemed to know when Lucas lied, but not if Lucas merely said something that was only kind of true.

So he started saying things the man wanted to hear, but only in ways that were mostly true. “Yeah, you’re right, I shouldn’t have done that,” Lucas agreed when the man asked him about the time he’d double-crossed Jamie and stolen his stash. Lucas didn’t regret it, though. That dude was a prick, and his shit had been weak.

That didn’t matter, though. What mattered was that he really did believe he shouldn’t have done that. There were so many better things he could have done with his time than that, like spending the night with Diana.

Regardless, it didn’t matter. This wasn’t his first shrink. He’d said what the man wanted to hear to get probation in the past, and he’d do it again if that’s what it took. He’d rather be free than proud, and right now, in this damn box, it was the only possible solution.

It would be impossible to say how long that conversation lasted. The lights never changed. He never got tired or hungry. All they did was talk and review memories.

Honestly, Lucas would rather be back in prison. Being shivved would be less uncomfortable than watching the moment the 12-year-old version of him managed to call 911 when he found his mother cyanotic on the couch that day he got home from school.

Darius could force him to relive each of these terrible points over and over. This went on for what seemed like forever, but little by little, Lucas’s explosions of outrage and frustration began to subside in the face of his caseworker’s infinite patience.

It was somewhere in the second or third month of talking that he understood the angel was wearing him down. Part of him even wanted to try again, but the greater part of him was never going to let that happen.

Still, he let that hope blossom until it showed through. That was when the man finally relented and decided it was time to move on to the next stage of his death.

“That’s why we need to work through what led you here and try to find a life that can suit you,” Darius said with a smile that gave Lucas the creeps. “We only want what’s best for you and all mankind.”

After that, they talked vaguely about what he wanted to do with his life, and Lucas said that he wanted to go somewhere exotic and maybe work outside for once as the angel scribbled away, but all he really wanted was to be let out of this damn box.

Eventually, that happened too, and the angel turned his file into a key and handed it to him.

“What am I supposed to do with this,” Lucas asked.

“Go wherever it leads you,” Darius smiled, giving Lucas a firm, almost fatherly handshake to go with yet another uncanny smile. “The process is pretty simple. I’m sure a smart man like you can figure it out, Mr. Sharpe.”

Lucas smiled blankly, willing his growing hatred of the man to stay down a little longer. He let that slide off his face into the scowl that reflected what he was really feeling when he turned around and saw that the door had indeed returned. He left without another word and was in such a hurry that he didn’t even realize that the hallways were very different from the one he'd entered through until he was two steps into it.

“Screw it,” Lucas said, noticing the clean white tile, along with the fact that there were many fewer doors and people than there had been before. Even the people that were here were mostly wearing robes or towels instead of proper clothes. It was just about from a brainwashing summer camp.

He could feel the key tugging him in one direction, and for a while, he started walking that way. Even as he smelled the damp, though, and felt the warmth, he knew that was the room he didn’t want to be in. That was where they’d melt him down and cast him to be another cog in the machine instead of the defect that he’d become.

Fuck that, right? He thought to himself, wearing a carefully neutral expression.

Instead, he kept his eyes out for a way out, and half a minute later, he decided that he had found the guy who was going to help him, whether he wanted to or not. He was walking toward Lucas, wearing nothing but a sauna towel and the same blissed-out expression that every other zombie in that outfit wore.

That was sad because the guy was young. He was like 20, which was even more tragic than Lucas, and judging from the marks on his face, he must have died from smallpox or something.

This wasn’t the first guy that he’d seen dressed like that, but he was easily the most confused, and most importantly, he seemed to be trying to unlock a door not so far ahead. So Lucas, being the helpful guy he was, ran up to help the man out.

“Hey man, let me get that for you…” he said, push the kid back.

“Thanks,” the stranger mumbled, genuinely grateful.

That made Lucas feel a little bad because what he was about to do was probably going to fuck the poor guy over. “Here, hold this for me,” Lucas told him, handing the other man his key.

As far as he was concerned, he was welcome to whatever fate Darius had decided was best for him. He didn’t want that wingless fuck anywhere near the rest of his life.

Lucas was able to get the key in the lock, but he wasn’t able to turn it. “Here, you try,” he said to the kid, figuring it could only be turned by the bearer.

He was right, of course, and the thing turned, along with the knob, to reveal… The void of space… For a moment, Lucas was startled, and it was only when he saw the kid walking forward toward it and the planet far below them that he said, “Hey, time out…” and pushed him away.

Before he could decide what to do exactly, he heard a familiar voice ringing from down the hall. “Mr. Sharpe, you should know that trying to interfere intentionally in the lives of others is strictly forbidden. That man’s door doesn’t even lead to your world!”

“Yeah, well… Eat me,” Lucas said giving Darius the finger, as he turned and took a flying leap through the door into the darkness. Better to die out there than endure whatever had happened to this dude in here.