Suddenly, all I saw was his face. Staring down at me with vast eyes. Scrambling in the dirt arena, I slowly tried to sit up with panic and adrenaline rushing throughout my body. My fingers ran through the sand-like ground trying to find support. I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. My mind racing trying to find explanations for what was happening to me.

I am dreaming. Wake up Lauren, now. So that didn’t work well then I’m a deep sleeper right, so I just can’t wake up. That’s all it is. Yet, sadly I was apprehensive to believe myself.

Whatever was happening to me I didn’t believe. My instinct may be telling me differently but there was no way I was listening to it. My mind went spiraling. Panic was shooting up and down my veins. And suddenly I felt it.

I felt a pain that no one ever should experience. It was a pain that shot straight from the wound on your body, right into your mind. One of those pains that just makes you want scream like only you are left on the planet. That way you feel when you realize your life ahead of you has just been affected by one simple, stupid mistake. That way you feel when you know that you can’t do the one thing that makes you happiest even when you could have just lost everything. That thing that you urge to do every single day, begging your parents to take you there even when they are packed with work. Yeah, you know that thing. That thing that you know you can rely on when everything just gives up on you and now, suddenly it has disappeared. Now it’s just you and your sad, lonely life ahead. You hoped that you would never experience this in your life. You loved that one thing to much to loose it, even if it was just for one minute, second, millisecond. This feels like everything you love and know is gone. Forever.

But, that’s not the problem. As you suddenly realize that your mind is going

down,

down,

down.

And you feel as though you can’t breathe. You can’t touch, taste, smell, see, hear. All of them are gone. The only thing you know in this one moment is pain. Pure pain from the top of your dirty hair strands dancing in the wind, to the bottom of your callused, over worked young toes. It’s almost like you’re in a white room with two things. You and your pain. But all of the sudden the world stops and you feel a single salty, dirt filled, mostly clear, wet, pain-encased tear. And it slowly drizzles down your cheek, onto your neck, over your chest, straight through your heart, around your stomach, dripping down your leg, out of your pants and into the dirt. Just like an arrow piercing through its target with precision and accuracy. This tear helps you, and suddenly you feel as though your lungs fill again with the best gust of air you will ever feel in your life. You are being pulled slowly back to the place you call home. Your earth. Your sky. Your air. Your dirt. Your feeling of being pulled up, up, up by one string attached to your chest. This string pulls and pulls until you finally see the place you feel you haven’t been to in a million years. Now it may have felt like a million years but, it’s only been 2 seconds as you remember that something was wrong and your mind was gone. Gone in a trance that pulls you in and hopes to never let you out in just one snap of your fingers. And as you come out of this trance you feel yourself once more.

You took a deep breath in and out. I finally look to see the thing that started this pit of despair in the first place. You are horrified as you look down. As you call out to whoever is around, someone who can and will help you, anyone,

“I don’t think this is in the right place!”