The sun sets at the end of everyday, marking the end of the daylight, but it was never the end of, or even a rest from, my journey. Darkness brought something quite different while I treaded those strange waters. Darkness never fully surrounds a person the way it surrounded me out there; it was a consuming darkness. Darkness had once, in my mind, represented a time of rest and rejuvenation; there it was a time of uncertainty and fear. The water, it swished quietly and turned bitterly cold. Slowly numbing at first all the smaller appendages, toes and fingers, and a shiver over my skin; which eventually brought a deep chill into my limbs, down to my very bones. My breath flowed steadily out of my mouth and nose in great puffs of fog in front of my face. All I could hear were my own thoughts running through my head to the rhythm of the moving sea.
Once I had paused to look to the sky and there, sparkling faintly by itself, was a star surrounded by a vast dark void. Loneliness marked that solitary star, striving to shine all alone. Its light was not particularly bright, nothing of magnificence to speak of. Still, it had managed to pulsate its flickering light all the way to earth. As I stared at that star something whispered to my heart, possibly the loneliness that plagued it, or even the empathy within it. It spoke to me telling me that the star that I stared so intensely at was myself, all alone in the giant void. Despair was speaking to my heart, forcing that feeling of loneliness over my being. Questions and doubts once again came plummeting into my consciousness asking me what am I doing there, or what I thought I could accomplish; telling me I'd never find the end of this chain, and that I'd certainly die out there. But as I had determined already, perception is everything. And deception was trying to trick me into thinking that I could believe what I saw as the truth, if only my vision was not deformed. I let those thoughts out of my head with a deep sigh and a large puff of fog. I strained my neck to look around the rest of the sky, and there, not so far and distant as originally thought, were millions upon billions of tiny lights burning, flickering, just like mine. All were struggling together to survive in that large dark void, hoping maybe they'd make it through the night. Each light was only a mere fraction of the strength of what the sun provides to us on earth, but together they seemed a mighty force. An army of tiny luminaries ranked together to fight against the darkness that surrounded them.