Shooting Stars Only

"Oh hey, can you please hold that for me?" you ask in an exceedingly anxious tone of voice as the doors are allowed to close in your face. "Bastard!" You new he heard your request, but chose to ignore it anyway out of either malice or apathy. "That damn bastard, I could be late, that…" but before your frustration (at life) had time to ignite into an immature tirade, you notice that the doors to the elevator next to the one you are standing in front of begin closing a rather pleasant looking young woman behind them.

"How very serendipitous" you whisper to yourself with a smile on your face as you maneuver through the closing doors. You nonchalantly position yourself diagonally from her.

At this proximity however, you notice her obvious aesthetic appeal is easily eclipsed by her good-natured glow. You felt a, for lack of a better word, goodness emanate from her body as clearly as you could see the color of her dress (mauve). At once it was clear, this was the day. The day that your mother always said would eventually come. "Don’t you worry about her," she would say about any woman who eventually tired of your character, "don’t you worry about her. You’ll find the right woman someday, and when you least expect it. You’ll find her, and you’ll know it." Well, maybe this was it. You had a feeling when you stepped on this elevator that your life would be changed. You would have admitted it to no one, especially yourself, being to analytical an individual accept such premonitions, but is it possible? She glances back to you with a superfluous smile. A chill runs down your spine as adrenaline bursts through your body. All that is needed now are the right words. Subtle, concise, conversational words. If only you were able pick out and string together in some semblance of coherency individual words from the thousands blurring through your busy mind, but to ask for the words was to ask for the world. Trepidation paralyzes you tongue. Words, your enemy for as long as you can remember, have never been at your disposal. Why could words not behave more like numbers? Whereas numbers were neat and derivable, words were disheveled and allusive.

The electronically produced bing startles you out of your trance. The elevator stops, she gets out. It continues its upward journey. Defeated, you dismiss the affair as an unnecessary distraction, like you have dismissed so many things.

Something is wrong, what’s wrong you wonder, what’s missing? No, what’s missing is not the question, but what was left in the absentee’s wake; silence. Beautiful silence. Your well of happiness may just have walked out the door while you were suffering for words, but at least your misery is not exacerbated by the incessant "music" they pipe into these damn things. If the music was not bad enough, the whiny sour jingles were randomly interrupted by commercials, final nail in the coffin. Commercials; propaganda spouting the benefits of products designed to ease the friction between the sexes, home computers sporting bovine mascots, and beer obsessed amphibians. Useless, all useless. Overpriced items for a trivial society.

"Wait, what’s going on here?" you ask yourself in a solemn measured tone of voice. It would not have taken this long to reach your floor, was it skipped? The elevator never stopped rising, yet the readout above the doors indicates you just passed the tenth floor. Recalling that your woman left you on floor 51, how was it possible to start over by going up? Then it comes to you, a reasonable explanation. The elevator stops on your floor, its only occupant too self absorbed to notice, and returns to its ready position, latter to be summoned by an expected passenger, which accounts for its current ascension.

Lacking a reasonable basis for suspicion, you nonetheless stair at the increasing digits with decreasing forbearance. As you near floor 66, the end of your line for the last six years, your pulse quickens. Floor 64, 65, 66, 67. . . "Damnit! What the hell is wrong with this thing?!?" Your misgivings soon blossom into rage as you start pounding away at the elevator walls and railing, a punishment for its disobedience. Your immature emotion however, is stunted after only seven seconds, for it takes only seven seconds for your world to end. Your ride arrives at and surpasses its apex without skipping a beat. The digital counter flips like a car’s odometer, restarting once again from the first floor. Worse yet, you never stopped, you have never stopped going up…up…up….

Debunking your flimsy theory of a slow moving elevator with an erroneous counter before allowed even a moments piece of mind, a noticeable increase in acceleration causes you to lose balance, both mentally and physically. The display runs through its collection of numbers in increasing intervals as it attempts to keep pace with the theoretical floors you are leaving behind. Convinced that the structural integrity of the elevator had been compromised, you brace yourself for the worst, a Demon Drop experience soiled by repercussions far exceeding that of an upset stomach. But to plummet to your death is redundant. What befalls you exceeds time itself.

The brass railing that had supported your sleep-deprived (and sometimes inebriated) frame and lay victim to your short temper on more than one occasion, was gone. A solid object you pounded on only moments ago had vaporized!

Consternation, panic, and terror offset by acute stolidity all vie for prominence in the forefront of your consciousness. Your mind, like the birthmother relinquishing possession of her son rather than see him cut in two, in a vain attempt at self preservation, leaves the world of reality on level 66. Unfortunately, the very act of such an unconscious decision invariably seals it fate. You watch the spectacle unfold before you with awe and stupid fascination.

A film like substance sprouts from the center of the button panel. It reminds you of the plastic films adhered to the metal or glass surfaces of items purchased in department stores. But unlike a the face of a new remote control, debilitating apprehension keeps you from touching, let along removing, the displaced disseminating film, apprehension based in factual absurdity. The alienated notion that coagulates in your brain warns that it would be best not to interfere with the unfolding scenario. As bad as it is, what consequences await the one who dares interrupt the diffusing membrane? Like a prisoner on his best behavior in hopes of an early release, you resign your will and spectate future events from a detached perspective

Before the film reaches the doors, the dark slit where the doors joined began to lighten, shade by shade. Was it that the absence of light itself could not even maintain its integrity?

The tightly knit industrial carpeting beneath your feet melts into a singe colorless panel of nothingness. The walls soon follow suit. The wood-grained laminate adhered to the interior surface area of the elevator appears to suffer from the torture of hundred years of direct sunlight in six minutes. But the color alone was not fading, so to did its very solidity.

Whether the doors chose to swell or the frame chose to recede, you can not decide. The fluid motion of their meeting is natural, like inanimate lovers secretly meeting in the night.

The light emanating from the two parallel florescent bulbs housed in the recessed enclosure running down the center of the ceiling undergoes a bizarre solidification process. The elongated bulbs come to spew forth a tangible white light like a gravity defying liquid, in sufficient quantity as to envelope all discernable features of what once was a ceiling of an elevator.

The sourceless white light uniformly diffuses over every surface. No, not surface, the cogent white nothing replaced the structural restraints of surfaces some time ago. You stand, a bewildered actor alone on a vast stage, pleading for his lines and direction. After a limitless amount of time the sourceless white light, your last vestige of atmosphere, begins to dissolve. The gnarled fingers of time clench your dimmer switch and begin to turn you down in such indiscriminate increments you can not discern the enveloping darkness. Impossibility gives way to reality while insanity smoothes itself out in long slender strips.

Dimmer, dimmer, done, all done. Whatever was is now never more. You heart pounds like never before. An inaudible inexplicable throbbing force materializes some distance before you. A force fueled by birth. The thunderous pulse pounds out again and again, pulsating faster and faster, until it catches pace with your heart. Tentacles of will penetrate you, take hold of guts, and reel you to it.

After relinquishing your being however, the summons loses its violence in favor of more alluring qualities. What would be the alternative to following the force anyway? You know not, but yours is not to know. Knowledge does not exist here, only feeling. To do what you feel is to continue to be. After an immeasurable time, the ubiquitous beatings give way to a deafening silence. The exhausted beat that once pumped through you everything you ever were, rests.

Your tired soul sits upon the nothing, and exists less in doing so. After a minute or a millennia you turn your head (you have no head) and see (but you have no eyes) a flaw marring the infinite array of nothingness. A dot of light, what once would have been a star, popped into being. A prominent star, you know, one with a past and a destination. But how, now lacking the head to turn and eyes to see, could you have bore witness to this bright feature vitiating this blanket of absence?

Frustrating as the end may be, time relentlessly refuses mercy. Not even the last pontification to float through your headless mind can be called your own as you focus your final quandary upon this anomaly, this "shooting star." You focus only upon yourself.