Dark. Black. Blind. No, not blind, but close enough to it. I seemed to be suspended in midair, but nothing was holding me up. How? I obviously couldn’t fly. Flying would be a stupid explanation anyway. I wasn’t moving, I was stationary. Gliding? No, that was basically the same thing as flying. Floating..? Yes, floating. It couldn’t be air. It felt… heavy. Not exactly heavy, but heavier than air. It was dense. Not air. Possibly water, or some kind of fluid. Couldn’t I just check? No, the darkness overwhelmed my sight, if my eyes were even open right now. It was dark, way too dark. I reached my hand out, couldn’t feel a thing. Just empty space. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t even lukewarm. I supposed it had no temperature. It felt like a dream in a strange way, identical to the feeling a person gets when they’re having a dream and they believe it’s real, but they also know that somehow something doesn’t fit, like it’s all make-believe. The only difference was that I knew this place was real. I couldn’t feel it, or anything for that matter, but I knew it was real for some reason. Were my eyes open? I had no idea. I wish that it was a little brighter at least. The white color annoyed me now. It was a little too bright. How did it turn white? What about the black? I guess it didn’t really matter. Either way I still couldn’t see anything, so I was as blind as I was in the dark.
I wasn’t floating anymore. I became vaguely aware of this after it turned white. I think I was still floating, but my senses told me I was falling, at least, the vertigo did. Falling farther and farther… was I falling by the mile or by the inch? I didn’t care. Falling felt good, in a strange way. It let me think, let me wonder. Let me hate, and it let me love. The best feeling I got was that it let me not care about anything. There was no one to shove their anger or sadness on me, no one that I had to face, none of it. No one to tell me what was right or wrong. It was just me, falling in this empty white space.

It reminded me of my childhood, being at a playground on a swing, going higher and higher until it seemed like I could touch the moon. But the most exhilarating part for me was going backwards, having my sense of direction being thrown off as I fell back towards the earth, not knowing what waited at the bottom, but somehow knowing that everything would be okay once I got there.

This was no different than the swing and the playground, except that there was nothing here, and I was only falling. There was no moon for me to grab.
The whiteness… it was familiar, like I had been here before. I didn’t think it was the “purgatory” that Bubbles was in, because this place felt peaceful. The “purgatory” gave off an aura of anger and loneliness. But this, I remembered this place somehow, and I didn’t know why.
A strange feeling surrounded me, something that told me I had stopped falling. I was now, without realizing it, standing on solid ground, but I still felt weightless. There was no pressure on any muscles to keep me standing, I simply stood. I hesitantly breathed a mouthful of air. It was cold. Cold enough to make my lungs feel like they were on fire. In a strange way, it was refreshing. It reminded me of winter. The soothing cold, the calmness of the winter sun in contrast with the icy wind. It was completely relaxing, just the way I wanted it to be.
I felt a small, almost miniscule tap on the shoulder. I turned my neck to see a tiny snowflake that had taken refuge on my right shoulder. Then five more followed suit. Then dozens of snowflakes began to fill in my white space. Like magic, the whiteness of my space turned into the white of the snowflakes, and everything transformed into a scenic neighborhood, with the exception of one oddly out of place house looming over the others. A thought deep in the back of my careless mind told me “home”. Curiosity overwhelmed me, and suddenly I found myself standing on the balcony of the old house. The world had moved gracefully as it happened. The colors around me swirled around like water in a drain and then set to a new picture, like a slideshow in water, except that I was living in them.
Again, this all seemed familiar, like it had somehow happened before, or I had been here already. A swarm of guilt overwhelmed me. My mind said home, but I could not remember this place. I only knew that somehow this place had meaning, a meaning I didn’t understand. I turned me body hopelessly to face the room that the balcony had jutted from, trying to remember.
The room was extremely messy, but there was nothing in it besides walls and a floor. The floor was made of old hardwood that looked like it had never been treated. It twisted where the knots in the wood would be, and it was chipped and rotted away. A few termites would rise and descend every second or so in search of better wood, and holes were common, appearing every few feet or so.
The walls were nearly the same in terms of disorder. The adhesive which held on the wallpaper had long disappeared, leaving them peeled off at the corners and suspended only by a corner at the topmost part of it. Wherever the wallpaper had peeled off, there was a hole in which one could see through to the other room, and looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. The ceiling was nearly the same way as the floor, and a huge gaping hole about five feet in diameter over the center of the room. Beneath the hole was a pile mixed of wood and leaves. For a reason I didn’t know, the hole was the most significant feature of the room.
I tried very hard to remember why this place was important to me, especially why the hole had caught my attention so much. After a few seconds of contemplation, I sighed, not remembering a thing.
I looked out towards the wooded area that was beyond the balcony I stood on. It was very peaceful here. Very quiet, and very calming. I wanted to stay there, though I knew I couldn’t. A part of me wanted to stay because it was so calm, but also because I knew that there was something I should know about the place, something I was missing. The other part of me, the dominant part, told me it was time to go. An odd feeling of slight panic formed in the back of my head, so I obeyed remorsefully.
I looked around at my surroundings one last time. This place, I thought, was the definition of serenity. Releasing a final sigh, I smiled, somehow knowing that I would be back here again. It would be okay, and all the pieces would fit together. I stared at the woods and then jumped from the balcony headfirst towards the dirt. The world around me faded to white again as I descended, and I was falling once more.