It was a dark and stormy afternoon when I had walked into the cave. I was bored and in order to find something to do, I was walking around my house, trying to find a hidden room or something of the sort. I knew it was ridiculous, but it was either doing that, or counting the bumps in the ceiling. I was just getting into the game, pretending that I was about to enter Narnia, when I felt the wooden floor of the huge abandoned closet creak beneath my feet. My instincts told me to leave it alone, that it was just a small creak, but there was something about a creaky floor, that made me crouch down and retrieve the floor board. There was an empty space beneath it, so out of curiosity I removed all of the remaining floorboards, so that I could fit inside. I looked down and I saw that there was a tunnel that extended for about 20 feet, and at the end of it, there was a staircase. I looked around to see if any of my parents ware around, because if they were, they would never let me go in. not since, the incident. then I went in to the tunnel, and I took a deep breath before I went down the staircase to see what was below my floor. It was cold, and I had the eerie feeling that someone was watching me. But I pushed the thought away from my mind.

I was expecting to find a medieval type of room below, but at the end of the staircase, I found a stark white, short hallway that had 2 small podiums at the end of it and a big black button that said “press me”. I walked towards the button, and pressed it. I don’t know what expected to happen; I guess I thought that a giant ball would start rolling and crush me, A-la Indiana Jones, but I certainly didn’t expect a female voice to say, “please walk towards the podiums.” My feet walked towards them, and the voice said: “in front of you there are two cell phones.” Indeed, there were two cell phones. The one on the left looked ancient, in retrospect. It was huge, black, and it had an antenna on the top right. It was labeled, 1997. On the right was a phone that was about a centimeter thick, it was black and silver, and looked so modern, that it seemed straight out of the Jetson’s. It was labeled 2030.the voice said “you are now probably wondering what these are for. “Yeah, it would be a really big help if you could tell me WHY there are two cell phones in front of me. Oh, and It would also be nice if you told me what this place IS, I thought. To this, the voice responded “curiosity always leads people to wonderful discoveries. In this case, your curiosity has brought you here. The hallway of time. a place where 1 small decision that you make will turn your whole life around.”I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. This was too weird to be true. “The hallway of time”? Yeah right. I don’t live in a science fiction book. I don’t believe in magic, or voodoo or anything like that. Or at least, I didn’t. This has to be a dream, I thought. And if it’s a dream, it’s a good imaginative one. “Ok, then what are the cell phones for?” I said. The voice responded “the decision that you will make refers to time. The two cell phones represent your past and your future.” Oh, so that’s why one looks so old and the other looks so modern! I thought. “The cell phone on your left represents your past. If you choose this cell phone, you will be able to go back to your past and fix the mistake that you regret the most. The cell phone on your right represents your future. If you choose this cell phone, you will be able to see a glimpse in to your future. When you are ready, and you are SURE that the decision that you will take is the CORRECT decision, please take a step towards the cell phone, pick it up, and take a deep breath. There was a quiet click, and then dead silence.

I was now, ABSOLUTELY sure that this was a dream. A dream that I wanted to wake up from. I really did not want to make a decision like this in a dream. So, I pinched myself, in order to wake up, but it didn’t work. I tried banging my head on the wall, but all that that caused was a headache. I paced the room, thinking of ways to wake from what was turning out to be a nightmare. I tried concentrating on waking up, but nothing changed. There was a deep silence when I brought myself to believing the truth. The truth that seemed impossible. The truth that I had never thought was true. The truth was: I wasn’t dreaming.

I took a deep breath, and tried to digest this slowly. Right in front of me was a decision that could change my life. Right in front of me was a decision that millions of people would kill to have. I mean, who wouldn’t love to choose between fixing the mistake that they regretted the most, and seeing one’s future? Me, that’s who. Think about it. If you fix the mistake that you regret the most, who knows what your life would be right now? You could be the happiest person in the world, or, you could also be dead. You see, you might think that fixing the mistake might only change things for the better. But the truth is, if you do something bad, something good happens. If you do something good, something bad happens. And sometimes, you just stay still, and the whole world blows up. Everything affects… everything. And as for seeing the future, what if you HAVE no future? What if you are going to be dead same time tomorrow? No one would like to carry the burden of knowing that when they are going to die. And if you try to change it, most probably the world would turn itself around so that just as you feel as if you cheated death, you might be the victim of a bus crash. The future is unpredictable, and in my opinion, it should stay that way.

But if I had to make a decision, it would be fixing my mistake. What WAS my biggest mistake? I thought, though the reason was right in front of me. I looked down to my arms, and I saw the scars that were barely healing. The scars that caused my family to become a nervous wreck. That caused my family to treat me as if I were something fragile. That caused me to go to the emergency room, and to therapy, therapy that I wouldn’t cooperate to because my purpose was not to end my life. And all because I thought that nobody listened. I needed to vent, and instead of using worlds, or a pillow, or simply tears, I had used a razor blade. One that went too deep into my skin, and caused me to faint. I was so dumb. So stupid. So childish. I really thought that that would fix my problems, when actually, it created many more. Although I know that I had made a wrong decision, before that day, I had never really taken the time to think about it, and frankly, I didn’t want to. So, I shook my head in order to route my thoughts away from that day, when I realized that I was crying. I then realized, that I had to fix my mistake. I took a step towards the cell phone, took a deep breath and then…

I ran towards the door that had brought me there, opened it, sprinted up the staircase, down the hallway, and up the wooden floorboards. I put them back hastily, and ran out the room, down my staircase, and down the front corridor. I opened the front door, and I ran wherever my feet could take me. I didn’t care that it was raining, for the rainwater just melded with my tears. After running for I don’t know how much, I finally sat down below an old willow tree. I was already crying, but then, I really started sobbing. All those tears that I held back. The ones about my problems, about my scars, about everything, those tears, they were just rolling down my cheeks. But I knew that I knew that I had made the correct decision. If I had corrected my mistake, then yes, maybe I would not have that terrible memory in my head, but maybe, sooner or later, I would have done the same thing, and maybe that time, I wouldn’t have been that lucky. Maybe I wouldn’t have been alive. Maybe there wouldn’t be a terrible memory in my mind, but maybe there wouldn’t be ANY memories in my mind.

That was almost a month ago. After I finished crying, I just sat, lacking the ability to go home, or do anything, for that matter. But, slowly, I went home, and calmed down. Now that I didn’t have a rush of emotions ready to burst at any moment inside me, I actually realized the damage that I had done. Not just to myself, but to my family, my friends. I started to cooperate in my therapy, and although I still hate my therapist, I have to admit, it helps. There are days that I feel good, but there are also the days that tempt me to open my floorboards again, and go rushing towards the cell phone in the left. I have been close enough so that I tore up about 3 floorboards, but then reality hit me, and I ran towards the willow again. There isn’t a day in which I don’t think of the hallway of time, and although I didn’t exactly take the expected decision, it helped me. It really did.