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The Unreal Place by H.J. Vanderiet
I’m not sure how many times I’ve imagined myself walking through the hallway that leads to death.
There’s a brilliantly bright light at the end, so bright that I cannot see what is in the room beyond it, if there is anything at all. But this hallway; oh, this hallway. I run my hand along its walls.
They are cool against my fingertips, and smooth, so smooth I think to myself they must have been paved by a builder with the steadiest of hands. All along the walls are framed pictures of people I’ve loved, and still love. People who have walked this hall ahead of me, and people I’m leaving behind. My Mema is up there, who used to ask me how my play was going, who told me stories of when she was in the Campfire Girls. Who lost her way in Dementia, and who thought for an afternoon that I was my father’s new wife.
I loved her.
My ex-boyfriend: who set me free during a time when I yearned for freedom, yet who later would not commit to a life with me, yet who later didn’t want to let me go, yet who turned ugly when I stopped speaking to him.
Who I sometimes wonder about.
My flesh tingles against the light bathing it, and all at once the answers of life and death, and the questions of the cosmos fill me deeply until I’m certain that nothing can separate me from them. Fear ceases as I reach the doorway, and smile at the sight.
H.J VandeRiet’s (Van-der-Eat) work has appeared with various student publications of the Jack Karouac School at Naropa University. This is her first outside publication. She runs a Wordpress blog called “Buslife Adventures in Parenting,” and is in the process of writing a 60,000 word manuscript