Touching Grass

     Silence. Nothingness. No one and nothing for miles on end. You could walk all the kilometers it would take to travel the earth and you would be met with the land stripped to its bones. Bare.

There were no other humans. Just you. There were no other creatures. Just you.

The loneliness had not caught up yet, and you felt as if you belonged everywhere and nowhere. But not here. You still thought you couldn't see. In a sense, you were blind. Blind as to what you had and hadn't done. Blind as to what those around you were doing. Blind as to what you touched, smelled, heard, felt, tasted, sensed. You continue to be blind. But now there is something more.

Still, you felt content for some incomprehensible reason. Even as your feet stopped moving, you felt content. Even as your eyes wandered around yourself, desperately searching for something to concentrate on, for something to gaze upon, a corner, a line, a color, a singular human being, even as you lost yourself, you felt content.

And still you decided to walk. You knew there was nothing up ahead. Nothing more than what surrounded you already, but instead you insisted. You walked. You walked and you ran and you sprinted and tumbled down. Your knees did not bloody. They couldn't, or else they would ruin the perfect blankness of the ground. Hurt they did, though. The pain was excruciating, and you wondered if, in this incredibly white world surrounding you, there was an imperfection, a small rock formation, a sharp stick, anything that you could use to ground yourself. Anything you could use to relate yourself back to what was normal.

You did bruise, bigger and blacker than you'd ever seen. Your hands were red and your knees were blue, if you could feel anything anymore, you would have found it ironic, perhaps even funny. Again, you began to walk.

It didn't feel physically exhausting, as the body didn't know it was walking. It only felt as though you were standing in the same desperate position, idle. Your brain knew better, but it was a cunning liar, and would not tell anyone else what it knew, not even you.

That feeling of loneliness began creeping back to you, climbing through your feet to your legs, reaching your back and neck, spreading a coldness you had never felt before. Although, even if you hadn't, you wouldn't know. You didn't remember anything from before this time.

Even your brain was blank.

Your body knew, though. And it was good at keeping secrets from your brain as well. It knew the feeling of comfort and happiness enough to make you feel uncomfortable and lonely. It knew that you were not where you were supposed to be, and yet it refused to tell your brain nor you. You could almost hear their bickering, but you shouldn't have been able to.

So you just kept walking.

You walked and walked for hours on end. Or it could have been minutes. It could have been seconds, it could have been years. You weren't sure how time passed in this realm, but you knew you had to keep walking.

There was something here, there had to be. It was pulling both your brain and your body in its direction and you knew it had to exist.

It had to.

Or else this would have been useless. This would have been worthless. This fight between your thoughts and your feelings, the lying between your body and your brain, it would have all been for nothing.

You pushed that feeling and those thoughts away, and you increased your pace. It would not tire you, after all, so what would have been the point of keeping a steady pace. Slow and steady would not win any races in this world. So you ran.

You ran forward, and when your breath became raggedy, and you realized your lungs were going to turn blue, you sat. You sat and you stared. You looked up and down, left and right, unsure of which direction was which; you knew that you looked every side possible, however, so left and right or right and left, up and down or down and up, right and down or up and left, you had seen all that was to see.