I would hesitate to call my life spectacular, or even just interesting, because to others, it isn’t. I view it this way. The endless cycle of school, homework, and sleep holds my head underwater, occasionally allowing me to come up for a gasp.

But, that’s how I live my life. Correction, lived. It wasn’t until a cool autumn day when the pattern shattered like a broken mirror.

Three days ago.

The cool wind nips at the exposed skin of my wrists and ankles, bringing a faint red tint to the surface. An assortment of leaves, red, yellow, orange and green trickle down on my path like a runny faucet; one drip at a time. The mix of wet leaves and the cool air burns my nose every breath I take. A walk will fix everything they say. I don’t have the time for this! I think as my feet kick and crunch the leaves.

I walk along the path until a bright light all of a sudden blocks my vision.

I take a step forward, and the light disappears. I step back. It reappears. I rotate my head side to side, finding that it only hits one area of my face, and it's coming from the left. I glance in that direction, and it's clear that there's a faint indent of the leaves, an unnatural bump in the path. Something silver, shiny and smooth draws the attention of my eyes.

I trudge through the mountains of leaves and the slight sink into the wet soil, until I finally approach the object. A handle. I wrap my numb fingers around the chilled metal, and yank on it with all of my might.

It doesn’t open. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to move. I try pulling again with even more force pulsing through my body. No movement.  I swear, if this time it doesn’t work, I’m just going to leave, this is too much effort. 

With one final burst of energy, the door flips open. A room sits below, concrete on the ground. A ladder on the side shifts with a sudden gust of wind. Something tells me to go down the ladder. Even though it’s against everything my brain is telling me, my muscles appear to have their own wants.

I crawl down, taking one step at a time into the rodent sized room. I nearly have to duck down to keep my head from grazing the top. If I spread my arms out, I could nearly touch both walls. These same walls are covered in an almost-black paint darkening the hidden room.

An ivory pedestal is positioned in the exact center (with a light that seemed to appear out of nowhere shining down on it). My feet shuffle forward, forward, forward until I am less than a foot away. 

A dull, lifeless cube about the size of a brick sits on top. Slate gray in color with cracks going down all visible sides. Nothing seemingly special about what’s being displayed. I reach out, my fingertips grazing the surface.

Suddenly, the ground shakes and erupts beneath me. My body is tiled side to side as I try to not crash to the ground. My stomach is thrown up and down, a dangerous combination. The surface of the cube begins to peel away like old paint on a wooden surface. A light ray shoots out and hits my face from where the paint had been peeled off. I bring my hand up to block the one, but more and more begin to rush at me, completely blinding me.

Two rough, calloused hands grip onto mine with a force that makes my wrists feel as if they are about to snap. My arms are wrenched back, my knees kicked out beneath me, and my hands are placed in shackles. A sudden blunt force smacks my head, and all I see is pitch black.

It wasn’t until later that day, I assume, that I woke up. White walls surrounded me. A bed with layers of blankets to the left of me. One would think it was a peaceful room, except for the metal bars that separated my imprisonment from my freedom.

A boy with slicked back black hair and a sharp jawline paces in front of the bars.

I call out, “Hey! Why am I in here?”

He turns, a shocked expression on his face, “You don’t know what you did?”

I shake my head, searching my brain for what I could’ve possibly done wrong.

“You exposed the Box of Eve. No one has ever been able to do that.”

I stare at him, face as blank as my mind when he says the words, “Box of Eve.”

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, which is what makes this extraordinarily strange,” He sits next to the bars, facing me, “Only those who have been blessed by Eve herself can expose it, and the last time that happened was over a thousand years ago.”

Box of Eve? Blessed? Expose? 

A new voice chimes in, “Which is why you will be staying in here, until we figure out who you are.”

At that moment, I knew that my life would be changing in a way that I would have never expected. My previous life of school and homework would be flushed down by a simple touch of a box. And as I sat there, trapped, I wished for my life to go back to how it was before.