32 CREATIVE NONFICTION Something is off. There’s a light in the corridor—a moving spotlight. Someone is coming. You clutch your chest, breath held. The effulgence washes over a storefront. You make out its name: “Forever 21.” For just another minute—just one more minute—you reminisce on St. Louis. And now, you’ve traveled deeper into the tunnels. The room widened. It opened up into a yawning space where concrete gave way to cobblestone. Along the wall, you noticed an open archway. For the fi rst time since you’d headed down into the labyrinth, you felt the tug of curiosity. It pulled so hard that your breath shortened, eyes brightened. What lies back there? Secret rooms? Ancient treasures? You needed to know. Time is like this too. It makes you feel the same way. You want to know where it’s going, what it’s doing. You want control over the future. You want to know that everything is going to turn out just fi ne. You lack autonomy in the grand pulse of the universe, but every now and then you’ll have moments like these. You’ll see a tunnel in the wall, or a door in the back of the classroom that you’ve never noticed, a dark hallway, or a deer path behind a shady thicket. There’s something about these places that scares you. They’re going somewhere. You are going somewhere. To exist in them, you have to accept your place between one world and the next. Between living and dying. Between faith and fear. Between ten and thirty.
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