Husks

Everything in your life has been leading to this moment.

They got you when you were young. Took away your dreams, your aspirations, anything you ever desired for yourself, and locked them away in a box. They left your head empty - robbed of the things that made it whole. They left you half-gone, your mind a screaming void, howling for purpose.

Then, when you were emptiest, they relented. But not quite. They poured new dreams into your head - theirs.

Like a desperate, starved animal, you gleefully swallowed the foreign dreams, and laid them down inside your mind as if they were your own. Like a Reed Warbler tending to a Cuckoo's eggs.

You were emaciated, atrophied, withered. Dead in spirit if not in body. They made sure that the things that had once filled your mind were long forgotten, and then they infected you with alien aspirations. And you, crying out for something to fill the aching void, accepted in an instant.

And the new dreams comforted you. They sent out roots of their own, and wrapped themselves around the many-layered creature that is your consciousness. The new dreams offered a way out of the tormenting nothingness you had tasted, and it was that exit that you embraced.

Everything in your life has been leading to this moment, and now the moment is over. The dreams are finally fulfilled. You should be happy. The dreams. Not your dreams.

And suddenly it's as if half your soul has gone.

There is nothingness. A vast, engulfing nothingness that swallows up everything you've ever experienced. Every thought, every emotion. All of them, good and bad, virtuous and twisted alike, now absent. The void does not discriminate. The nothingness howls at you, peeling away the layers of your being.

The shallow comfort of foreign dreams is gone, not even a memory remains. They left you as a discarded instrument. You want time to flow backward. In the face of forever, all you want to do is shrink - to return to the womb and sleep once more. Anything to make the emptiness go away.

And then - as you teeter on the brink of eternity - a box. You start to remember.