People always warn you that your life could change completely in just a single second. Tragedy, as well as any other life changing event, can appear suddenly, without warning and without hesitation. One moment you're casually existing, doing the things you've always done, living the life you've always lived, and the next moment suddenly everything has changed.

I always thought I understood that. That when, or by all hopes if, my life were to change in an instant, I'd be able to keep going. Even if it was hard, even if it was confusing, I'd always believed that I'd be strong enough to keep going. Even if I was alone.

I'd had some rough points. Had some problems here and there, who didn't. But overall, I had it good enough. I had faith in my abilities. In myself.

For as long as the stars in the sky were in their same simple pattern, and as long as I lived on the same Earth my family and my friends lived on even if only for a brief moment, I could keep going.

Those were my foundations. The things I had chosen to put my faith in, the things I had managed to believe would never leave, would always be there. Stars and a stable ground beneath my feet. Shouldn't those have been stable foundations? Shouldn't those be things I could trust? I needed a foundation, everyone does. Be it your family, your friends, your home, your morals, your dreams, your passions, there has to be something. I chose the most stable things I could find... and believed that I was safe.

But what if all the stars left and were replaced by flashing lights? What if the Earth as I knew it disappeared into a cloud of smoke or a dot in the distance? What if my foundation crumbled beneath my feet, falling to pieces and taking away every part of my life that I had built upon it?

What if my life changed completely in just a single second?

That, I never considered. For as distrustful and uncertain as I was, I always trusted the stars and the Earth. They are always there, even when they fade behind clouds or shake beneath your feet, and they would still be there long after I'd gone.

The stars would always be there. No matter where I was, I could always look up into the sky and know the stars were looking back at me.

The Earth would always be there. No matter where I was I could look down and know beneath my feet is the same soil my ancestors walked on.

I chose them as my foundations, my only foundations, because I trusted them. More than anything else in that world.

But of course, as everyone knows, life can change in a second.

And there was, in fact, a day where the stars did not look back at me.

And there was also a day when the ground I stood on was no longer Earth at all.

And I was not, in any way, prepared for the sky that awaited me when I opened my eyes after a simple blink.

I remember... yesterday. The day I got here. Yesterday.

It's strange. Looking back at everything, or at least everything I can remember. It doesn't really feel like a day has passed, as much as I've tried to believe it, but it doesn't feel like a lot of time has passed either. I just feel numb now.

But I'll look back at it. See what I can see. What I can remember. Decide once and for all how much time has really passed, if any, since yesterday.

It was a Friday in late December, I think. It wasn't snowing, it never did where I lived, but I know it was Winter because I'd been excited to go out with my friends later in the day to go celebrate the end of the year before driving home to visit my family. It was winter break of my third year in college, and I was happy as any other to finally be going home for the holidays.

I remember I was walking home from work that day, wondering if I should get gas before or after meeting up with my friends. I think so, at least. I don't always have much faith in my memory, I've been wrong before.

I do remember turning the corner onto my street and seeing my apartment down the road. My neighbor was heading out with their dog and were headed in my direction, and I'd been wondering what to say and whether or not it would be rude to just say nothing and just walk past them. They were on their phone anyway, maybe they wouldn't notice me? What if they looked up though? Then what? Would I smile? Wave? What if they stopped to talk? What would I say to them? The weather was normal, what else existed?

That was the uncertainty I knew would kill me here. That quiet, bumbling, painful awkwardness. The kind of thing that wasn't so bad back then, but that grew fatal the second I stepped into this world.

That was the last thing I remember from then. That slight, sinking feeling of doubt I got seeing the person in front of me. One person, just one person, one single moment of a nod or a hello or a greeting, made my head bow, my shoulders draw in, my gut tremble.

Just one person. Did I ever stand a chance?

I was around 10 feet away from them, maybe a bit more, and I had been staring at the floor, periodically glancing up to see if they looked like they were going to say anything, when I blinked.

I didn't think I'd closed my eyes, I'm still not entirely sure that I did, but for a moment, everything was dark, and then it was bright, brighter than anything in my entire town had ever been. I've always believed it to be a blink.

In the time it would have taken me to close my eyes and open them, hell, in even less time than that, everything disappeared and was replaced with something new. I was here.

I blinked again, then stumbled into a stop, my mouth dropping open dumbly in shock.

Where a moment before there was a bunch of houses in the suburbs with a few apartments dotted in, there was now a city so bright it made my eyes burn.

Where there once was a light blue sky and a sun, there were now dizzying, flowing, moving patterns of glowing lights swirling along the sides of buildings that reach so high into the air that any trace of sky was hidden.

Suddenly, where there had been only one just moments before, there were hundreds and hundreds of people. Maybe even thousands. Yes, that's more likely.

Someone bumped into me from behind, started saying something I couldn't hear from the noise of the crowd. They were probably cussing me out, the idiot standing stupidly in the middle of the street. Instinctively, I backed away, and crashed into someone else.

I opened my mouth to apologize, but as I turned my eyes were filled with even brighter arrays of color, and a wave of dizziness ran over me. Everything was too bright, too warm, too close, too wrong. I felt like I was spinning, swirling downwards in an ocean of people, having only minutes ago been standing on dry land hundreds of miles from any body of water larger than a small lake.

I can still feel it. God, even now, even after everything, I can still feel it. It was like being struck by lightning. Everything exploded around me, light, color, movement. I can feel even now the way it hit me, sent me reeling, spinning, spiraling, just thinking of it is making my hands shake, I wonder if they ever really stopped. It was like fireworks had gone off around me, and was still going off, constantly exploding again and again, knocking me over while still leaving my standing. I can feel it. I still feel the explosions, the shock, the absolute terror, it never did go away.

I couldn't think. I can't place a single thing that crossed my mind. Something or someone bumped into me again from a different direction, and that momentum pushed me forward into a stumbling run. I wasn't running to anything, just away from whatever pushed me, I didn't know if I was making my way out of the crowd or just getting further in, but I ran, fighting my way through the crowd, crashing into people at full speed and falling sideways and backwards, miraculously able to find my footing time after time and continue running. I've still got a scar on my arm, either from when I fell or crashed into a cart-like-thing someone was pushing through the crowd. I'm surprised it never got infected.

Fight or flight, I guess. And who could I have fought? Who would I have ever been able to fight? The world itself? All the people in it? Flight was the only option there ever was for me. There never was anything else to do.

I ran that day. It was panic like I'd never felt before, or maybe I have, who knows. A gut wrenching panic that rises in your throat and out your mouth clogging up every word you want to say leaving you unable to do anything but scream, but you can't scream, because you can't breath, and you just suffocate in the agonizing middle ground between screaming your lungs out and desperately trying to pull air in.

I'm not sure if I screamed. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. It was so loud. Everyone was screaming. It doesn't matter if I did or didn't.

I needed to stop, to hide, to think, to make sense of what was happening, but the crowd only thickened as I pushed my way through it, and I felt as if I were drowning in a sea of light and life.

All around me was color, and joy, and excitement for an event I knew nothing of in the moment, and there I was in the middle of it, terrified out of my wits, spinning and crashing and burning all the while, fighting to swim without any water and struggling to breath with plenty of air.

Everyone around me was screaming into the fake sky, making me even more disoriented than I already was. Days later I'd realize they were counting down, but it only took me a few seconds to find out why.

A loud explosion boomed in the distant sky, and it shook me out of my frantic scrambling enough to look up and see what had made the noise loud enough to be heard over the already deafening crowd.

There, up in the sky filled with windows instead of stars and made of colors instead of space, were bright, flashing words right where nothing should have been, staring down at me as if to mock me for my terror.

"Happy New Year!" They said to me.

"Welcome to the year 3059!"