Oblivion...

I woke up coughing smoke out of my lungs. 

Pain stretched over my entire body as I drifted, rotating weightlessly around an enclosed corridor. 

My body was encased in a heavy layered suit of flexible aluminum that only left my head and neck exposed.

Gravity devoid droplet's of blood danced about me slowly as a glass visored helmet made of the same suits material floated nearby. 

“What... the hell.” I thought. I couldn’t remember much of anything. Blank spots in memory. 

My head pounded and vision blurred as my ears took in muffled sounds.  

I reached one hand to the back of my head, the motion delayed from the design of the heavy suit, and to where the throbbing pain seemed to originate. I pulled my hand back into view to see my fingers covered in light red blood. 

It was then that I noticed the flashing red lights and heard the sounding of the alarm. 

Reality came rushing back. Space station… I was on the space station. Sluggish thought. Was this the airlock… 

A banging could be heard from the window of a sealed door about 15 feet ahead of me, the window of the door coming into view every few seconds of my spinning rotation. Clockwise motion. 

A browned skinned woman stood there, her face expressionless, lips pursed tightly together. Her eyes were an irritated red. As if she’d been crying. 

“Aeon…” I managed to murmur.

The woman’s voice suddenly came from everywhere above me, the overall sound warped and partially distorted. 

“…no time… four… wall… penetrated…” 

I squeezed my eyes together, opening them to find my vision a little better. 

“It’s not fair… I know that.” She said, the words came to me more defined now, clearer. 

“It is what it is. The constant flow, the realization. Final beginnings and new endings for all of us, always intertwined.”

I coughed again, the remnants of smoke and fire in my mouth. Fire... 

That was very bad for what basically amounted to a pressurized container floating in space… 

“The door… let… let me out of here..” I managed through a wheeze. 

She closed her eyes. Tears slowly drifted away from her face instead of falling down her cheeks. 

“You’re supposed to drift… restricted oblivion. Shock effect.. questioning of existence..” She spoke absently.

I stared at her in confusion. “What are you talking about? Open the door!” 

She turned her head away from me, her eyes focused intently on what I was sure was the digital panel next to the door. She began typing into it. 

I drifted towards the back of the airlock opposite the woman. It took some effort to orient myself, but I was eventually able to get my legs into position. I braced my boots against the double door mechanism there and thrust myself back, eventually twisting right before I slammed into the glass framed door the woman stood behind. My shoulder took the brunt of the impact. It brought more pain to my already battered body. 

I grabbed the handle before being propelled back and pulled my face into the small window. Dull smoke filled the space beyond and behind the woman. 

A digital panel slightly down and to my right displayed a keypad highlighted in red. Numbers suddenly flowed into my scattered memory and I typed them into the panel. “1..1..3..7..” 

A weird burping style noise that must have been an error message sounded and the keypad flashed from green back to red. I shook my head, staring down at it. 

“This is what it has to be...” I heard her say, slightly muffled and through the glass in front of me. I glared up at her, our eyes latching onto each other almost intimately.  

“What it has always been...”

**EXTERIOR AIRLOCK DEPRESSURIZATION SEQUENCE DISABLED**  

A robotic voice spoke from above and panic engulfed me. 

“No…” I said in a frantic voice. The realization of the situation finally hit me. 

“You can’t do this... I trusted you. You have to open this door…” 

She shook her head, never breaking eye contact with me. What resembled remorse spread across her face. 

“There’s no changing it.” She said, sadly. “Everything's lead up to this point. There's no going back. Look for it. A moment of truth shows itself. Utterly bright. Entirely opposite of the expanse.” 

She kept her stare a little longer before dropping her eyes to the floor. 

She finished her entry on the keypad, closing her eyes before she spoke again. 

“19… 18… 17…..” 

I just stared at her in shock for the first couple of seconds before glaring around the airlock. My helmet floated loosely behind me towards the double doors. 

I pushed off from where I was positioned towards it, determination replacing the shock and original confusion. 

It took a few seconds but I was finally able to catch and grasp the helmet in both hands, my back coming into hard contact with the airlock’s doors. I glanced back at the woman, my eyes wide. 

"10… 9… 8…" Struggling to get the helmet up and over my head, I took in a deep breath while pulling down at the bulky thing in an attempt to connect it onto the locking mechanism of the suit. 

Scant effort.

I tried my best to get my breathing under control, inhaling again then slowly breathing outward, expelling all the air in my lungs. Basic training. 

“3… 2… 1.” 

The last thing I heard was the loud clunking of the airtight door’s lock releasing before my entire body felt as if it was being sucked up through the smallest hose of the largest vacuum. Pretty accurate actually. 

“One one thousand…” I counted in my head.

I spun circularly out of control for the first few seconds of what felt like eternity, losing grip of the helmet I grasped at so desperately in both hands. 

My mouth pushed open slowly in what may have been an attempt in a scream before I toggled at the suit's inner hand triggers and its thrusters. 

What I felt all around the exposed parts of my body was… something unlike anything I’d ever experienced. 

Something I wasn’t meant to experience. 

A cold so foreign, so out of touch with anything I knew of life. A sweat of the tongue that turned boiling hot. My heart rate spiked but also seemed to steady at the same time. A physical oblivion manifested. 

I was able to orient myself around the 6th second, my body still flowing rapidly through the void. 

I saw it then. The brightness. Utterly bright. The intensity of it burned itself into my now torn blood vessel eyes. It made me think of scripture. The heavens. “Its lamp is the lamb..” echoed throughout my mind. The fear I felt was for the briefest half second replaced by utter joy. I was a curious child again, carefree and excited about simply existing. I was an ambitious young adult ready to take on the world. I was an elder, the utmost content and at peace with life and myself as a whole. That light engulfed me while carrying an awareness of all things within it. 

I’d managed to keep counting and my body came to a slower drift around second 10. 

I started to fade in and out of consciousness at that point. 

Everything came back into focus when I hit it. My body ricocheted harshly off of something in front of the literal space before me. 

I didn’t feel it. Not the impact. Not the pain. I was vaguely aware that THAT wasn’t a good sign. 

The suit seemed to bulk out, as if I’d swollen to twice or more of my actual size. 

“What was the count now..”

I spent my last couple of seconds glaring ahead. Staring with incomprehensible eyes. Eyesight that was already fading slowly into darkness. 

Despair hit me then. Not for myself, rather for what we’d come to form as our understanding of existence as a whole. What it meant to “BE.” 

Mankind. Earth. Space. The universe. She was right. It was only what it was... 

The constant flow. The eternal intertwined moment.  

I could almost see the curvature of the solid drab wall of darkness as it stretched forever, endlessly, across the supposed universe.