The warmth replaced by a piercing cold, a chill so deep and lonely it froze my very bones; that's the first I noticed. I opened sleepy eyes a crack, stirring from some other plane, shaking the dust off, and there was a transparent hole in space and time where tanned, naked flesh belonged. Where, and why? I tried to reach out, but my arm couldn't grab hold of anything solid. And yet, An Essence remained, calling to me. I had to follow it-through the wall. It sucked me in, ripping my very soul from its vessel.

It feels like years, maybe it's been minutes or seconds. Somehow Time couldn't fit through the portal. It's so easy to get lost down here, but I just need to think of those eyes and I know. I remember. I descend a thick, old stone staircase. Deeper, and deeper. It seems older than the earth, older than the universe, heaving sighs of a forgotten age. The stone walls are moist, dirty lines dancing, twirling into cryptic messages. They told the story of the world. I know everything was there, everything was on those walls, spinning the thin threads of Fate and Time. They tell me stories as I descend. Stories that keep me company in the long hours, stories that distract and seduce. Lost in the life of The King of Pop, an ant on back of a bench in church, watching the funeral of a beloved great-uncle, or a monster curled in the dank basement. Still I feel a hand on mine, somewhere far off, and I leave all this world behind. Maybe I never lived in the above –plane. Maybe my whole life has been on these never-ending stairs, going lower, lower, lower. Have I ever even been alive?

I don't know.