#untethering

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"Right." I took a deep breath and slowly letting it out. The door opened again. "See you soon," I said as I walked inside.

"Don't do anything too stupid," Jamal said.

"I just stepped into a room that will untether me from time because Kink and Freyja told me to. Is that stupid enough for you?"

Jamal laughed. "All right. You just set the bar, now try to stay under it."

"I think he's supposed to go over it," Tilly said. "Right? Setting the bar high is supposed to be really hard. Isn't it?"

"What? It's like limbo," Jamal said. "You've got to go under it."

"No. It think it's like high jump. You've got to go over it."

"Does it matter?" I asked, as the doors started to close. "We should all just try not to do something incredibly dumb and get killed, ok?"

"Yeah, that's a good idea, Frank," Jamal said. "Don't get..." And then the door slammed shut and I was alone in the untethering room.

Panels on the wall began to glow red. Then blue light began to stream up from the floor. I started to feel very warm throughout my body. The lights went off, replaced by an orange light from above. All the warmth was taken from my body, like I had just plunged into ice water. I could feel the heat continue to be pulled from my body. I wrapped my arms around my body but it didn't help at all. I shivered mightily, but it was soon forgotten because then came the pain.

It felt like a steel umbrella had been inserted in my spine and quickly opened, over and over again until my entire back was torn open. I screamed as every synapse in my body was laid bare and set on fire. The pain continued seemingly forever. I was having a hard time thinking about a time when there was no pain.

And then it stopped. For a microsecond, I got to feel relief and then my perception of everything got real small. It was as if everything that I was or ever would be got squished down into a single point in time and space. And then that winked out. Then there was nothingness and I was nothing. I had strange awareness of this nothingness. Like I was on the outside, looking at the nothing. I could look and see there was nothing and that nothing was me. It only lasted for a split second, but it seemed to be much longer. Both forever and in the blink of an eye, as if there was no such thing as time. Nothing and yet being. This was my situation.

to be continued next week