Let Go and Leave

#Reflections

They had always told her not to leave the planet. To stay home, within the city. Isla had never questioned authorities, she liked following rules and having order. But there was this one part within her that filled her heart with the burning desire to just leave and explore the galaxy. However dangerous the world seemed in her grandparents' stories, it also seemed so bright and exciting.

Isla was nineteen now. She was old enough to make her own decisions. She was strong enough to carry on on her own. She was not going to be stopped from following her heart. And she knew what she was leaving behind.

Her parents would have to take care of her siblings themselves now. Her sister had always encouraged her to leave, so departing from her would be the easiest. It was her four year-old brother that worried Isla. The girl had always hoped to teach him how to pilot B-class spacecrafts but now he would have to learn it on his own. He was so innocent and not ready for this world.

"No, don't stress out now", Isla whispered to herself. "You can send messages home, or gifts. It's not like you're vanishing completely." Grabbing her backpack, she crept into the garage without looking back. Isla tried to recall her grandmother's stories. Tales of planets covered in soft, green grass or scourging, deep blue waves. Cities whose buildings reached into the sky with technology that her home world, a dusty, boring farm planet, would never reach.

The garage door slid open without much noise and Isla's one-man ship slowly ascended into the void of space. "That's the advantage of being a backwater world, I guess", the girl thought. "No one even bothers to check who's got permission to leave or enter."

It would only be minutes now until she reached them. The Reflections. Everyone feared them. No one really understood them. They could be made use of or they could kill you. Before Isla even had the chance to philosophize about the matter, there they were. Isla gasped. She had imagined the Reflections a lot of times but what she saw before her eyes now was tremendous. Hundreds of little images that seemed to be floating in small pools of water - at least the softly fading waves at the edges implied this was a watery substance - surrounded her. How did she even enter this space? Maybe this was a bad idea after all. She tried to turn her ship around but it would not obey her. It was simply sucked closer, almost as if the Reflections had their own gravity.

"If you travel interplanetary you need to let go completely" is what her grandfather had always said. So Isla loosened the grip of the steering wheel and let go. "Take me somewhere beautiful", she thought. And just like that, she slid through one of the pools and was thrown into a whole new world.