You are born with stars in your eyes.
You brim with possibility, raw and unbridled; you are energy, unrestrained by the world and its divisions. As you are, you are nothing and everything, a mold with infinite potential yet no shape. Existing for no one but yourself, you float free of impediment.
You are tetherless, surrounded by nothing but blankness and void. You tense up, your muscles seizing as if compressed by an unseen force, but you don’t feel the grips of panic setting in. Instead, you relish in the curious feeling of being pulled downwards. Like a rag being wrung dry, you feel inverted in on yourself, folding and twisting until you lose all sense of direction.
You absently remember being here before, but the familiarity isn’t comforting. You squeeze your eyes shut in a futile attempt to dissolve the nostalgia, and from behind your eyelids you see an image begin to form. The absence of light in your realm sharply contrasts the scene painted in your mind, awash with color and vibrancy that you have not yet learned how to process; you are still a blank slate, but the imagery shapes you, just a bit. You hesitantly open your eyes and are met with swirls of light plastered on the dark, colorless background that’s grown familiar to you; your eyes widen, and you feel awe for the first time in your existence.
Time flows slowly and nonlinearly, but with every sudden burst of color into your surroundings, you find yourself more and more in tune to your ground below. You’re unsure of where your feet should land in the springy dirt before you, but you trudge ahead anyways, stepping carefully, hesitantly. A flash of vibrant blue flits in front of your eyes, and you watch the tiny winged insect as it darts back and forth between the blades of grass; you are no longer alone in this world, and moreover, you aren’t exactly sure if you are the same person you were when you first opened your eyes.
For the first time, you worry over who exactly you are.
As the world grows and converges and expands around you, sensory input hits you like crashing waves on a windy day, and you feel conflicted, confused, and above all else, a deep-rooted sense of curiosity. You know that each new contact changes your identity at its core, but you feel driven to push onwards despite your fear of change. After all, this world is yours- you are its heart, it is your root. It has shaped you in the same way that you built it from ground up; the sand beneath your feet pulls your head down from the clouds, and the wildlife tells you who you can and cannot be. However much you try to block out their noise, you recognize yourself changing; your ideals, your mannerisms, your sense of identity shift and deform to fit into the set of standards that you have been tasked with meeting.
The color of your new world is beautiful, and you feel lucky to have been born into it, but with each fleeting moment you look back on your old self, the ‘you’ who had stars in their eyes, and grow more and more frustrated with the futility of your existence. You are held back by your roots, but if you are born a blank slate, is it even possible to escape those vines that grip you and hold you to the earth?
You are told by a snake to not worry, and you oblige. There’s no point in thinking, anyways. It doesn’t get you anywhere.
You have been blessed with a world of color, incomparable to any other, and you think that you are happy.