A soft humming filled the cold air around my unmoving body as I awoke. At first I didn't realize that I was even conscious, but slowly reality began to take its place among my dreams as my eyelids slid across the planes of my inanimate irises.

Outside, the moon was not visible amidst the stars, which gleamed dimly in the black void of space. The street lamps below the stars cast their orange light upward and downward into the sky and barren concrete, choking off the light of stars from the horizon.


As the light of the streetlamps reached around the contours of my face, I felt my pupils dilate and contract to adjust to the sudden surge of brightess. Along with this brightness came the shape of my room and the objects in it. Posters and pictures lined the walls in a disorderly but somehow uniform fashion, and clothes could be seen draped over chairs and a desk, forming odd shapes that reminded me of people and masses of tar.

My eyes again refocused as it took in familiar sights, contracting and expanding as if trying to get away from something. The constant movement began to hurt my eye sockets, and finally I closed m y eyes and instead listened to the world around me.

The soft humming continued to fill the waves of air passing through the wintery night; humming that I assumed was some sort of machine, much like a computer or perhaps something distant outside like a vehicle. Neither sounded correct to me, and try as I might, I couldn't place the sound.

I was soon distracted from the humming by a slow movement that came from my immediate right. I could hear the movement almost, gliding through the wind as it fell delicately downward. No sooner had I heard the movement when the feel of soft skin touched the surface of my chest. A hand, I saw, lay gently there as I opened my eyes to the shattering darkness. The wrist and arm that belonged to this hand lay attached next to it, curving around my chest and shoulder fluidly, until I saw that the arm belonged to another who lay next to me.

I shifted my glance to meet the other's gaze, which was covered by wavy locked of seemingly dark hair, seeping through the cracks it could find. Slowly, but almost instantly, I found my own arm brushing the hair away from this stranger's face. The hair obeyed the movement of my fingertips, retreating behind a nearby ear and resting upon it. Still staring into the face of this stranger, the skin of my hand brushed smoothly across the rounded features of her face, coming to stop finally just below her chin. Her eyes gazed softly into mine, somehow piercing through my eyesight and staring into my mind introspectively. Her gaze knew mine, and mine knew hers.

The piercing of her gaze deterred all other senses of mine from my thoughts. Only my sight remained, and through this sight I saw into her mind as she had seen into mine. Together, we seemed to explore the crevices and sheer blackness of each other's thoughts. Each of our minds in turn thought the same way, operated the same, and knew the same. Neither of us spoke a word, for fear that the noise would somehow break apart the gaze and succumb to the darkness of the night. All I could do was stare endlessly into her eyes, noting the graceful movement of the swirling colors in them.

Trying to determine the distinct colors, I moved closer to her face out of sheer curiosity. I searched for an indefinite amount of time, curious and also anxious to know what made the shape of her eyes turn through themselves in the way that they did. However, the shadow of the night did not permit me to discover what these tints and hues were, and silently I released a small sigh.

The sigh seemingly broke my gaze and shattered the noiseless barrier as it was released into the frosty space, and once again my ear turned its attention to the growing humming outside. Careful not to look away from my curious partner, I listened intently to the sound, all the while still trying desperately to discover what fluid colors rested immobiley in the set of eyes staring into mine.

The humming suddenly decreased rapidly in pitch, followed by an intensely enormous flood of white light that filled every part of my empty room. I lay on my bed, confused and startled, when the windows above me shattered into tiny glass crystal shards. The miniscule pieces of glass fell lightly and quickly on my body, and immediately I was found staring outside into an indefinite white space.

The white light faded away until all that remained was an orange moving pillar in the distance, choking the night as the streetlamps had.

I felt myself begin to panic. I searched the earth around me and the stars above, looking anywhere for an answer to what was going on. In the sky, I found my answer.

Falling from the sky were a small group of scattered stars, it seemed, descending quickly, almost as if they were sprinting toward the earth below. Behind each star was a small ball of shining yellow color moving as though it were water or some sort of fluid, and behind that, a trail of gray smoke. I knew then what it was, but I refused to accept it. Not here, not now. It couldn't be, but it was.

I whipped my head around my room, searching for something, though I didn't know what it was. I wanted to force time to reverse itself, make the white light disappear, force the glass pieces back to its originality. I wanted to stare endlessly into the pair of beautifully mysterious eyes through the night that I had seen earlier. This was all too soon, too sudden.

Again, another humming noise rapidly decreased in pitch, and once more my bedroom was filled with rushing frozen air and a violent white night. I turned my head downward from my room and found, piercing my gaze again in a state of panic, the pair of eyes that I wanted to see.

The light bore into the night sky with tremendous intensity, and through this I saw the swirled colors I had tried to determine once before. Shades of brown circled endlessly around a pool of green splotches, and in the midst of the colors was a soft blue that almost seemed invisible to the eye. The colors all ran to the center of the field that they lay upon, stopping briefly and suddenly into a pit og black that made the pupil.

The brightness in my room intensified instead of retreating like it had seconds ago, and it grew more with each passing second.As I stared into the stranger's eyes, I realized that she had never been a strager to me. We knew each other, even when we didn't know each other.

Again, through the endless white night, I resumed my exploration with her through our minds. I wondered silently to myself, even if it didn't ultimately matter, if she could see the color in my eyes as I could see hers. What mattered most in the moment was the soft touch of her skin, the light and subtle movement of her hair in the wind. Her unmoving eyes.

I had found what I was searching for through the night. Now, I simply let our thoughts and images in our minds connect until they were one together.

Silently, slowly, the white filled my room until nothing could be seen. Eventually, nothing could be heard or felt either. Even so, the thought remained, and the white continued to shatter every sense of being until it was the only thing left.