...3059?

My heart seemed to stop beating entirely as I looked at the display of colors above me, and for the briefest moment I really stopped and took in the world around me. The sky had exploded with bright neon lights, and all around me people were laughing and cheering. The color in the sky faintly reminded me of fireworks, but it was more solid, more permanent, as if I were staring at a giant TV screen in the sky. All around me unbelievably tall buildings donned bright banners that swayed in wind I couldn't feel, advertising products and wishing a great new year to all who could see it. Little balls of light that resembled the sparks at the end of sparklers danced around above everyone's heads, and people would pick them up and toss them around at each other like balloons. People made their way through the crowd selling what I could only assume was food, and others were crowding around them waving small fluorescent books and what looked like lighters.

There was so much color, so much noise, so much everything, where there should have just been some houses and trees.

I could feel my breaths coming faster by the second, and my hands felt both achy and numb. Colors were swirling, noises were swarming around me, bright lights and a sharp smell of something that may have been food, and I started spinning, spinning, spinning, no way to crash or to lose speed or to escape from this nightmare.

I tried to force myself to calm down, but I was backing away as fast as I could. All I could think was I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here please someone help me I have to get out of here.

It felt like I was in a room that was slowly getting smaller. All around me the crowds of people seemed to be growing closer, denser, threatening to crush me with every movement, even though there wasn't all that much space in the first place. I remember thinking, I have to run, I have to get out of here or they're going to crush me to death. I have to get out of here, or they're going to kill me. They want to kill me, they want to, they're going to if I don't run.

And so I ran. Shoving my way through the crowd as fast as I could, not even slowing to apologize though the thought kept nudging at the back of my mind somehow, running with a greater panic than the one I'd been feeling moments before. I didn't know where I was going, all I knew what that I had to get away from there. I had to get away from the crowd, before they tore me to pieces and swallowed me whole.

I just had to run. Or they would crush me. I knew that. I know that.

I ran and stumbled and tripped and crashed, once I fell to the floor near the wall of a building, just close enough to crawl over to it. I huddled there for a moment, trying to hide from the crowd around me, trying to block it out and piece my mind, but someone noticed me, and walked over in my direction, saying something I couldn't hear. They began to kneel down next to me, to say something else or again, but I ran away before they could get closer, hoping they wouldn't follow me, knowing, knowing, that they'd crush me if they did.

The mass of people seemed to go on forever, and no matter where I went everything looked the same, the same buildings, same people, same noises and lights, but eventually it grew thinner, and I was able to run without plowing anyone down. I ran and ran, deeper into an empty part of the city that I would later realize was only empty due to everyone else being at the celebration of the year. I ran until the noise of the crowd was far in the distance, and the glow of light and color in the sky had faded to a level that was no longer suffocating me.

I ducked into what looked like a smaller, darker street than the others, but turned out to just be a really large alleyway. I turned to go the other way, but tripped on my own feet and fell to the ground, knocking my head pretty hard in the process. Too exhausted to get up fully, I backed myself into against the wall and finally calmed myself down enough to break down crying.

My muscles felt like they were collapsing in upon themselves, I had a pounding headache and a shaking heart, my knees were scraped and my left arm was probably still bleeding, I could barely breath and even when it did it felt as though I were inhaling knives, and no matter where I looked, nothing in the world felt familiar or unreal.

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The ground beneath me was solid.

The air I was breathing was pure and clean.

Everyone within a hundred mile radius was celebrating a new year and spending time with family and loved ones.

And I was in the alleyway, watching my world crumble more and more as my brain tried to piece everything together.

In that moment, my entire world was falling apart around me.

I took a step, and went billions of miles.

I blinked, and day turned to night.

I simply existed for a single second, and a thousand years passed.

Everything I thought I knew shattered like a dropped figurine.

Except it hit no floor, there was no ground for it to smash against and lie on pitifully as children looked on and wondered how they would break the news to their mother.

It fell through empty space, falling faster and faster, slowly getting crushed by invisible forces from all sides, expecting to hit ground any moment only to find there was none and that it would fall forever into an emptiness it never even knew existed. Never even knew was possible.

My world had fallen apart around me before. It was never as bad as the kinds of things other people went through, but I'd had a few rough bits here and there, even before yesterday. I'd watched near everything I'd trusted crumble around me one by one, year after year, but I'd always had some pieces left. Every time my something or my piece of everything crumbled I was left with nothing but ruins, but never once had my entire world just disappeared like it did that day. Never once had I been left falling through space without a foot of land to grab onto.

When my pieces fell into crumbles around me, at least the foundation of it was still there. At least there was a way to recover, something to build off of. But this time there wasn't. This time, there was just me. A weak little girl who cried at insignificant, tiny little things, and who never had a chance in hell. In this world.

I still remember how it felt. I can still feel the smooth wall of the building on my back, I can still feel the burning in my lungs as I gasped for air, I can still feel the way I was shaking so badly I couldn't hold still, I can still feel it all, as if i'm still sitting there, still staring up at the towering buildings. I was scared.

Sitting in that alleyway, I was hit by the shuddering waves of ice that went through me. I could feel it in my center, that one little dot in the center of my chest, that familiar feeling of ice that had invaded my senses. My fingers were aching and shaking and at the same time felt numb, my breaths were both too deep and too short. My eyes were blurry with tears and my throat trembled with the effort of trying to keep myself from sobbing too loudly for fear of the terrors I sensed to be just around the corner. I must have sat there in the darkness for hours, waiting silently as my mind frantically tried to put itself back together, but it only seemed to crumble further, to fall deeper into the hole it had found itself with every breath I took, every flash of light I saw in the distance.

I waited, I waited, for the world around me to crumble away as well. To disappear in a flash and let me find myself at home, in my room, on the floor outside my apartment, or hell even in a hospital bed.

I waited for the lights on the walls to grow dimmer, to fade away, to become something I knew they were supposed to be. A pale blue sky on a winters evening. Or hell, a dark blue sky of a midnight in summer. A purple and orange sky of an autumn sunset. I just wanted a sky. Any sky. Anything other than the buildings I was seeing, because those buildings were wrong. They shouldn't be there. They weren't supposed to be there. There was supposed to be a sky there. So I waited for it, and with every second, minute, and hour that passed in which it did not come, I felt the weight that was crushing me grow ever heavier. Fake things were supposed to disappear. To break. To fade away. So why were they still there? Why hadn't they gone away yet?

I sat there, craning my neck upwards, watching the buildings remain stubbornly in existence, feeling my neck grow sore and achy, trembling in a cold I couldn't exactly feel, shaking and whispering to myself the promises I needed to hear, that it wasn't real, that it would all go away, that it would all be okay.

I waited a long time, adrenaline still shaking through me killing everything else, but slowly, slowly, my whispers slowed. My shaking sobs became less frequent. My eyelids grew heavy, and my gaze drifted downwards from staring up at the colorful buildings, and I huddled behind my knees, hiding myself from the world and the world from my heart. I still let out a sob every few minutes, but they grew weaker and weaker with time.

Eventually, my muscles relaxed, completely exhausted. I knew the dangers of sleeping alone in an alleyway, but I didn't care. I couldn't care. It just didn't quite feel real enough for me to care, though it continued to insist that it was. So slowly, slowly, I hid in my makeshift shell, my fragile shield from the outside world, and drifted off to sleep, thankful for the briefest moment that the buildings had finally done as they ought to, and disappeared from the world I was in.