Above and Beyond Forever

To leave a comfortable life just to move on into the unknown is very scary and can leave one afraid of what might be lying in wait for them after they start their new adventure.

But this is the story about such a moment that happened in a blink of an eye and left much unanswered after beginning the adventure which went from dream state to nightmare forever leaving an imprint on my mind.

I was living in a town of not more than 1,000 people, who were living there more like lost refugees than actual residents. They all walked about in a daze and not aware of their surroundings, much less anything else, like the changing of the days or months or anything else. Just dazed and confused.

I was one of those people, yes, those 1,000 people who like them was not aware of anything else except always wanting to see what was outside of this town or the lack thereof trying to figure out a way to get past the things that I was blocking my line of sight.

I see the gates. I see the guards. I see the sun rise and the sun set. I am intrigued by the opportunities that lie in wait for me. I want to know what is on the other side. This is what I imagine.

I see a field of grass. I see a large field of grass that leads to mountains and a stream and to other things that are a part of nature. With no restraints and no one to question what you do or say. Yes, freedom, real freedom beyond this miserable mess of a place that I call misery.

I look to the gates and wonder what is beyond the gates and how I can find a way out through the gates. I dream of such a way to get out of the gates to the other side.

What I find out later after I get through is still a mystery and I will get to that later. I was incredibly surprised at what I saw and what I thought I saw were two different pictures.

I headed back to my house and started to look up some answers to what I needed to achieve this momentous event. One that I would never regret. Yet regretting was what I did after I made it past the gates.

I studied the landscape, calculated the risks, and even planned this down the minute details hoping for a solution that would cover all the things I had placed on my list and hoped for the best.

I tried not to look the guards directly in the eye, not even once, because I was hoping to have their attention placed elsewhere. I was certain I could divert from me to something else or somewhere else, even for a split second.

I knew I was willing to take the chance that would allow me, what I had thought, a hope for freedom, but it turned into something worse than was to be believed.

I was being watched or so I thought, was being followed, or so my mind had me thinking. No such thing was happening, and it was never that way at all.

When the time came for me to smell the aroma of freedom and taste the agony of defeat, after I had won the right to it, I was less than hopeful of what the future held for me, and the others left where I was before.

I ran towards the gates, opening wide for my escape, not looking back and not stopping for anything. No one shot at me. No one called out to me. No one chased me.

"I was free at last." "I was free at last." I shouted. "Damn, why was it so easy to leave without a fight?"

I then turned around to see that the guards were only statues and I was fooled into believing they were real. No one was ever going to follow me or chase me or shoot at me. Ever.

I turned back to the gates and realized that this was all in my mind. The guards, the people, the blank stares.

The reality that never was. The reality of something long since dead or left for dead. The site was dissolute and deserted. The place I had believed I was to stay at was long since abandoned. No one was alive or real in any sense of being alive.

I was the remaining survivor of what used to be a planet, Earth. I was here alone in a world gone crazy and the area that I had lived on for so many years was long since gone.

As I explained earlier, I was now going to show you with my words and hope that you would not fall victim to your own devices. Your mind can play tricks on you, and you may never know what or how to react to that trick it plays.

You are left with a sense of loneliness and hopelessness, leaving you feeling empty. I was feeling as though the war had been lost and nothing was to ever come of this reminder of one's own ignorance and greed, stupidity, and anger.

The world I had hoped for was never there. The life I had hoped to achieve was only a memory and was a mirage. Leaving me to see things as they were, as they are and as they would be for me now on.

I would never forgive myself for being one of 1,000 people who had taken a chance on getting my freedom, to seek out the freedom I had believed was real. I was now looking at the last remaining evidence of one's willingness to sacrifice for the good of all mankind.

"How had my own blindness caused this to be the reality I had tried to avoid from the beginning?" "Was this the reality that I had been asked to make happen no matter where it led us all to?"

"If this was a reality as part of a dream, then why had I never woken up?"

"Was I to live in this hell that may or may not be real to me, even to me?"

Then the buzzers sounded, and I knew I had to escape before all hell broke loose.

I was surely awake now and ready for the unknown. Whatever unknown that may be, for me and for all.