Death

Dying isn’t fun. You would think that finally reaching the end would be like taking off tight shoes, but the reality is far from it. Gasping for air while a young man attempts to pull you from your totaled car is an odd experience. Your entire body hurts the entire time it’s happening and then you feel yourself slipping into a strange sensation. Imagine a mix between when your leg falls asleep and when you hit your funny bone on the edge of a desk. Not a pleasant occurrence, but not an insufferable one either. It’s more of a disappointing jolt that leaves you rather startled and often confused.

When I look at where my life was at the time of my original death, I find solace in knowing that my death was fairly decent. It was certainly possible that I could have died a few years back by choking on popcorn, but thankfully a car crash was the final culprit. Some figure that a blinding white light or a long tunnel awaits your final moments, yet that was far from the case. I ended up hydroplaning on my way back from work, and as my car spiraled out of control, there was little that could’ve prevented what happened. My last words were a mix between some song lyrics and a quick “damn it” before a rapid bit of barrel-rolling ensued.

I wasn’t religious. My mother had tried to push Sunday School on me at a young age, but there’s only so many times you can question existence before you realize that everyone else is doing the exact same thing. Others had feared death in the same way that I had, so they created a nice story to help accept that everyone’s existence was going to come to an inevitable end. I still couldn’t help but wonder why my time had to come to an end at such a young age. Maybe the plan was always for only twenty years, but that seems a bit cruel.

There wasn’t anything awaiting me on the other side. Some expect gates or blackness, but to be perfectly blunt, there are no words to describe the experience in the correct way. It’s a paradox in a perfect form. No true sense in understanding can explain what happens when you die. Embracing what occurs after you pass is like trying to kiss an oncoming train. Before you can even grasp whats going on, its completely over. Maybe we were never meant to know the specifics, but I can describe the second I became aware of my existence again.

Like a distant memory, I remembered my life. It was short, sweet, and perfectly to the point. I was a virgin and ended up masturbating roughly one thousand and eight hundred times. I had made over forty-thousand dollars in salary over the span of a few years of minimum wage work. I graduated from high school with a diploma, and I ended up with two years credit at my state university with an IQ of 120. My parents were upset about my death, but they moved on after a few years of grief. It turns out that they would go on to live for a few more decades longer than me. My mother died at the age of sixty-three and my father died in his early seventies.

Time has very little meaning now that I’m dead. To me, my parents only spent a few moments longer than me living. Honestly, you would be surprised how short a lifespan really is when you take the age of the Universe into account. Humanity has only existed for a small fraction in accordance to the entirety of time spent in this expansive universe, so it really puts things into perspective. I find it funny that I cared so much about my tardiness or trivial details like how long I slept.

Forever is a mighty long time. Now that I’m dead, I never expected to know the full strangeness of existence. Life is but a small piece of the full puzzle, so I now continue forever into the void, alongside everyone whoever existed. Not in a perpetual state of joy or sorrow, but in that of simple form. There is no need for emotion or feeling now that I have no body to experience it with. I could easily simulate it, but there is very little desire for me to do so.

Once you die, think of it like flipping the pages from the end of the story back to the Table of Contents. Once you realize that it’s just a book, you understand that you had an easy ability to control the narrative and re-write it. I’ve re-lived and gone through my life in a multitude of ways already. Hundreds of lifetimes, all with a strong sense of control every time. Imagine having the control switch to every interaction, situation, and second of your existence.

One of the first times I changed things was for preventing the accident. I also had sex a few million times. I’ve lived lifespans that range from seven-years old to a few hundred centuries. You have no idea how exhausting being the President of the United States is. There are no words to describe how exhilarating it is to fly like Superman. Perhaps the worst life to live (in my opinion) is that of Adolf Hitler or Abraham Lincoln, but the most fun is that of Colin Hanks or Bill Gates.

I’ve lived thousands of lives and I’ve died countless times. To exist is to feel both joy and pain. Life is but an illusion, but it’s the greatest trick ever pulled. There is no God that you cannot become, because your existence is that of everyone who has ever existed, before or since. Life has only one true purpose.

To live.