"Pleased to meet you take my hand, there's no way back from here."

Morning sunlight penetrated the room between the slats in the blinds, forming a ladder of light beams starting on the floor climbing partway up the wall. The Heart had been awake for a while, at least an hour he estimated by the distance the light had shifted across the room since first creeping in at dawn. “Two, three, four rungs on the light ladder.” He stayed very still and quiet, waiting for nothing in particular.

The Heart was nearly certain he was actually awake. He considered getting out of bed to see if anybody else was up, to see if anybody else wanted to get some breakfast or maybe just a strong cup of coffee down the street. “Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen rungs…” The rest were probably hung over from the revelries of the night before.

“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine.” It had gotten too warm to have the blanket completely covering him, but it was too comfortable not to. Another weekend was passing by, another chance for the Heart to sacrifice his own comforts so that others wouldn’t be hurt. “Thirty-four, thirty-five.” Another chance to accumulate stories that he couldn’t tell in their entirety to anyone.

The light ladder was crawling slowly up the wall now. “Forty-one, forty-two.” Why couldn’t he get up and take himself out for coffee, tell his stories to a medium green tea chai latte, listen to the stories the wind has to tell, laugh at the jokes life is cracking all the time?

The Heart got up out of bed and placed his hand next to the shadow ladder on the wall opposite the window. “Sixty-eight rungs total.” A ladder that went nowhere. An exercise in futility. But then the Heart turned back around to the window and said to no one in particular, “Plato was right about the cave.” He walked over to the window and pulled the blinds all the way up, revealing an entire world teeming with beauty— effectively killing the shadow ladder. He took a deep breath and drank it all in, and he hoped to God he could remember this the next time.