My Tears Are Becoming a Sea

Beyond Reach

- "We don't need a star to play the lonely astronaut; we need a boy, a simple, unspecial boy." -

He was suspended in an abyss that stretched on forever, blanketing him in an eternal twilight of nothingness and everything all at once. It was a state of being neither here nor there; yet it was simultaneously the furthest point one could be from reality.

He could no longer feel like he existed within all that darkness; as long as nothing existed with him, he was alone, floating small and solitary as if the persistent loneliness had imprisoned his very soul.

Till a star suddenly appeared in front of him.

There was no stellar formation nor a ten million year wait when it happened, no accumulation of gas and dust that collapsed due to gravity, it just appeared in the right spot at the right time, broadcasting its beauty and lighting up the path forward.

"Where are you?" The star asked.

Caught off guard, the boy reached towards the blinding fluorescent light in hopes of searching for something unfeasible.

"I'm here." He answers back to the stars question.

Nothing but Craig and the star was surrounded by all that unknown, yet he thought that if he stretched his hands out and welcomed what he had with open arms, it would reveal a thousand light years of what he couldn't see before.

"Where are you?" The star seems to ask again, the voice coming off as distorted and distressed.

"I'm here!" Craig calls out, hopelessly kicking his feet wishing he could float faster, ready and willing for what was to come.

Even when between nothing, from every corner or if there even was one; his emotions still felt like everything. The endless vacuum of space leaving the boy breathless of soul, piercing cold and sharp right through his caged chest, and wanting full heartedly as he reached towards something he felt like he used to know.

"You're not here." The star claims, before all of its bright tenderness seemed to fade away.

"No, Come back! I'm here!" He yells fruitlessly, swinging his arms and kicking his legs as fast as possible yet still feeling as if he were stuck in the same place, while his vision went red and blurry as if both blood and tears had been shed.

"I need you!" He calls out again, watching as the star disappears and he is once more soulless and left with nothing.

———————

When Craig woke up the first thing he noticed was how his entire body felt; physically painful.

Endless scorching pain felt white hot and fiery against his muscles as he blinked sleepily into wakefulness, and an additional feeling of something on the side of his forehead had caught his attention, though it was unlike the blood that had dripped down the side of his cheek from earlier; it felt like cotton.
Aside from his sore muscles aching in pain, his other senses had noticed other factors, those of which were his environment.

It wasn't dark like when he had exited the spaceship, no strange circle of stars to form a pattern above the black abyss, it was an enclosed area presumably underground with a yellow lamp lighting up the place. The walls and ceiling were constructed of dirt, yet the floor was made of unpolished wood that Craig was sure if he ran his finger across he'd get a splinter or two, and he was laying on his back on what seemed to be a cot.

Is this where the kidnapper walks into the room and fucking molests me before stuffing my dead body in a giant suitcase?