literature

And that is how i died...

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I don’t know what compelled me to pick up the gun. I don’t know why I put the barrel between my lips. I certainly have no idea why I pulled the trigger. All I know is that I regretted it immediately.
You often hear of near death experiences, of people claiming that their life flashed before their eyes. I never believed them. How could so many years, so many long and tenuis years, pass by in your mind so quickly that it’s referred to as a “flash”? It wasn’t a bit of lightning or a comic book hero: it was a lifetime, something that is too long to “flash” in and out of existence so quickly. Just like making a great pie, it takes time to get from the start to finish. So why is that moment of recollection and remembrance referred to as a “flash” when it can’t possibly come and go so fast? I always wondered about that, the “flash” that supposedly came before death. To be honest, I never really believed in it. With such a dramatic term to use for the event, I always thought it was people exaggerating their traumatic experiences. I never believed that a “flash” like that was real… that is, not until I heard the little click of a gun.
You see, after the trigger was pulled, there was a split second – wait, no. A split second is too long. It was more like a fraction of a split second. There was an extremely brief period of time where everything seemed calm. You could feel the fear that came before, the pain that would follow, but in that miniscule moment, all calm. I should have been panicking, given I’d regretted my choice, but something forced me to be calm. Something would not let me spend my last fraction of a split second worried. It wanted me to feel, to see everything that had and would have been. It wanted me to revisit every moment of my life, every thought I had to show me what I had done. That’s when it happened. That’s when I started to believe. In that impossibly small moment was when I realized that the “flash” of images and memories was real. I know it was because it sucked me in without asking if I wanted to go.
It was strange, at first. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I saw myself as a child, crying on a swing set. A young boy sitting next to me was licking and ice cream cone. My mom told me I couldn’t have one. I was too young to understand that my older sister was dying of cancer and my parents had to save all their money to afford her treatments. I also didn’t understand why my dad started acting funny in those same days, how he would sway on his feet and throw up in the bushes on the front lawn. He had taken up drinking to cope with what was happening to his eldest daughter. I remember mom crying and yelling at him, asking him to be strong. He was a big man, my father. He could lift me up on his shoulders and carry me around the house… I didn’t know back then that there was another form of strength.
Next came other memories and moments, images of me playing alone or trying to get my parents attention. It never worked. I remember eventually forgetting my older sister. I couldn’t even remember her name. I was too young to memorize her face and my parents got rid of all her pictures after her heart stopped in a cold, white hospital room. The most prominent feeling I got while reviewing those images, the ones of my parents ignoring me and of playing by myself, was loss. I didn’t know what it meant, but I could always feel it even if I didn’t know it. Revisiting those moments, I could feel the loss. It was not the kind of loss you might think I felt, though. I was too young to feel as if I had lost a sister, a sister whom I never saw since she was always in the hospital. I felt the loss of my parents though. They might have been physically there, but they made no attempt to reenter my life. I felt the loss of companionship, of safety, of love… I started to realize that my sister’s death would eventually lead to mine.
The next situation I saw was of me in my middle school. I had recalled having a friend, a single friend, back in those days. The friendship didn’t last long. I never trusted that he could actually enjoy my company considering not even my parents could, and that, even though I was a little happy because I had a friend, something in my new that I wasn’t worth his time. When he stopped hanging out with me, I thought he had simply gotten bored of me. I had thought that maybe rumors about me had made him lose interest in the quiet girl who was used to being alone. It wasn’t until, in that moment, that I believed the truth of why he stop being around me. It was in that moment that I accepted the fact that he did like me and that because of his attraction to me other boys in the school were threatening to beat him up, to run him over with a car if he didn’t stop spending time with the little girl who didn’t feel a thing. They were wrong of course. I felt pain as well as sadness and loneliness. I was wrong too, though… about so many things.
The last thing I saw was my parents. My dad was almost brain dead from all the alcohol he’d consumed over the years, and my mom stayed silent. She didn’t talk much after the incident. I remembered mom throwing a college brochure I had hidden in my room in front of me. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look at me. I thought she was accusing me. I thought it was her way of telling me that I was unworthy and too stupid to go to college. I honestly thought she was trying to tell me to stop trying just like her and dad because life wasn’t worth it. I had never been so wrong. Revisiting that moment in the fraction of a split second, I realized that it was my mom’s way of encouraging me. It was gesture to apologize for not being there, but that she would help me get where I wanted to go. She had failed one daughter, she wouldn’t fail another. That’s what I should have understood by the gesture. I took it the wrong way, though. In response, the next day, I put a gun in my mouth and fired off a shot.
I was back in that tiny moment. I had seen my life flash before my eyes. I understood why they referred to it as a “flash” after revisiting my life. It was as if, in that tiny split second, your life restarted. It was as if you watched a movie of your life where someone told you the context of the situation so you understood how you felt, but you also knew the truth of the situation. In that magnificent last moment I got to revisit every moment of my life and understand where I went wrong, and when I got back to where I was… it’s as if no time had passed at all. It’s as if my whole life passed by in a flash of lightning, appearing for a moment just to disappear the next. There was so much I wanted to do, so much I wanted to change… but it was only a fraction of a split second. As it tends to do, time went on and my moment ended.
And that is how I died…
I got an idea for a short story describing what it might be like when you die... I don't know why all my short stories have to be so morbid, but I think this one turned out pretty good. Tell me what you think!
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