It’s dark. I’m breathing heavily with my eyes wide open to see if I can get so much as a glimpse of something, anything. I don’t prevail. I hear things, but they’re distant. I slowly walk forward with my arms out before me but find nothing. I’m alone; at least I think I am. I feel a presence, like its slowly coming up behind me. I turn around and stay completely still as a weight of something like a hand presses on my shoulder. It’s someone I know, someone I used to know very well, who was the most important thing to me at one time. They speak to me in the slightest of tone, telling me we will get out of here. Everything stops and I go into a flashback.

I’m now looking over a lake in Vermont, sitting on a hammock while my friend is fishing off of the dock. Sitting there just staring at my phone, “Ugh why won’t he text me back?” I groan. We had just climbed a mountain and back together on a school field trip, he couldn’t have forgotten me.
“It’s been like five minutes,” my friend replied.
I ignore her sass and smile at my phone once again. Pass time, that’s all I have to do to make waiting seem less like forever. I take a picture of my legs with my skinny jeans and Sperry’s on and the sunset over the water in the background. Okay, that took about thirty seconds. What now? I put my phone on the ground next to the hammock and get off. On the soft grass I walk over and step onto the creaky wooden planks of the dock where my friend was fishing. “Look it’s a pumpkin seed!” she exclaimed. I looked at the yellow, orange, and slightly green fish just slightly smaller than the palm of her hand. I run and grab my phone over near the hammock and swipe up to open the camera to take a picture, a high quality one at that. Great, another five minutes passed. I cross my arms and then walked inside of the sizable, dark brown lake house.
I glide across the hardwood floor of the vacation house kitchen all the way to the stairs that lead up to two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a yoga room.  My feet go up slowly, one after another like I’m in some sort of movie. I walk over to a big window looking over the lake in the open room used for yoga and everything reminds me of him.  The sky, as cobalt colored as his eyes, the sun reminding me of his blonde hair. My phone vibrates, and it’s him. I look down at my phone and read his message while the butterflies frantically fluttered in my stomach.

But now I come back to reality, out of the safeness and warmth of my flashback, and back into this house.
The person in the room with me just then, the one in my flashback, has vanished. It’s like his warm hand touching me gave me a memory of him and just like that, gone. My eyes flood and I feel my body burn up like I’m sitting in a sauna. Something’s different now; it’s brighter. I wish he was still here, I wish he wasn’t just a memory. I turn around to what looks like a normal living room, but very old fashioned. A carpet with patterns of dark reds, browns, and off-whites is sprawled out on the creaky, hardwood floor. A fancy red couch with faint patterns of old flowers sits right before the carpet begins. The white, old curtains on the windows are dusty, so dusty that even the lightest blow of air would send the dirty particles scattering around in the rays of light, beaming in from the window. Light. I walk slowly and carefully along the scratched up, old wooden floor boards beneath my black boots. I’m afraid that if I walk to fast or rambunctiously, I will fall through the very floor planks that hold me up, and drop into a deep pit of snow. I say snow because even in my black pants and green jacket, it’s still freezing in this house. I walk cautiously to the window. I want to open the curtain but the dust makes me nauseous. Whatever, I need to see the sun and maybe even get the chance to see where this house might be located. I grab the only part of the curtain that doesn’t seem to be totally covered in dust with the tips of my index finger and thumb. I pull it back slowly towards me but I have to step back to avoid being showered with the grey powder on the curtains that has been collecting for who knows how long. The brightness hits me and I close my eyes to embrace it. After about a minute of waiting for the warmth of the sun to shine through the windows and hit my skin, I’m still cold. My eyes slowly pry open and adjust to the intense brightness, and I see nothing. Except a white light in front of me, taking up the whole window, like I was a fish in a bowl, right in front of a TV with a blank, white screen. A tear rolls down my cheek. I feel like I’m trapped in a lightbulb. I can’t help but to think about what might happen, what’s probably going to happen, when the light turns off.