I slowly open the door to my bedroom and shut it behind me with my back against it. High school has proven to be more straining on my emotions after I have been accurately diagnosed and medicated. With a clear mind, I can look at my past self with a sparse clarity and it leaves little to be proud of. It was if I spoke whatever thought entered my mind without any filter or fear of what harm the words would cause. A friend of mine noticed the change in my personality after the meds kicked in. “You used to not care what everyone thought of you.”

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                Now I cared, because I could see the way they looked at me and I didn’t like it. I was a grenade without the safety pin, hurting feelings and laughing about it. The only ones that I can say are my current friends, enjoy laughing at others with me.

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                I walk over to my nightstand, take my journal out of the drawer, and hop on the bed to flip through the pages. I remember writing in it while I was manic, but I don’t recall what I wrote. I can only decipher some of the pages as most of them are illegible sketches and bizarre theories. Since I was young, I thought it was fascinating that, with all of our science and technology, no one can prove what happens to a conscience after its body dies. Science and our known existence is so complicated, with the possibility of infinite dimensions, that I always refused to believe death was as simple as you spend eternity in a void, a dreamless sleep. I believe whatever decided to allow our bodies to draw breath is more creative than that.

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                I turn to a blank page and begin to write… hopefully something a little bit more legible.

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                I finish three paragraphs and move my pen to the top of the page to name my new theory.

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                “Our purpose on Earth, and where we go from here”

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                My desk lamp flickers from a sudden surge of electricity. Five seconds pass and it happens again. “A change in the Matrix.” I whisper to myself with a smirk. I then glance out the window to see the darkness from late evening replaced with an eerie white, a blank canvas with no source of light. I close my journal and slide off my bed to the door and open it. More white enveloping the landscape where the hallway used to be.

               

               “Hello, Kate,” a deep voice to my right echoes throughout the white abyss. I turn my head to see a man in a suit behind a desk with a chair in front which he motions to. “Please have a seat and welcome to the Enlightened.”