“The Near Death Experience”

“The Near Death Experience”

The familiar feeling of a fistful of pills festering in her stomach dissipates away to a strange airy lightness as she feels her body float up from her bed.

Did it work? Is it all over?

…It had to be enough this time.

She feels herself float up and up for what seems like ages, the void of blackness finally giving way to the gentle twinkling of stars above her. She looks down, and while she can still see her bed below, she also notices that she’s wearing her favourite dress from when she was 8… she hasn’t seen that dress in decades, not since the garage sale before the second move.

And the shoes! The shoes she wanted for Christmas and never got! The ruby red ballerina shoes, oh she wanted them so bad…! It seems like such a small thing to dream about now, but back then…

She wishes she could want something like that again, just once more.

Expecting the soothing golden light to welcome her to the afterlife, or at least some relatives she is meant to have loved greeting her, she waits nervously for something to happen…

The gentle twinkling of the stars above starts to slightly unnerve her, as their twinkling begins to feel… oppressive somehow. Ominous. Even though she is seemingly floating in place, she can feel the stars coming closer, somehow mocking her…

Each sparkle of the stars blasts within her head now, ricocheting around her brain, and she can feel the presence of fully formed thoughts planted directly in her mind. They weren’t said with words or sentences, but simply concepts, ideas that she can’t quite articulate out loud…

But she knows now, that this is all a joke. Everything.

Everything she ever knew, loved, or cared about, is all a joke. None of it is real. And the fact that we think it is real, she realizes, makes it all the funnier. It’s a massive prank pulled on all of humankind.

And none of it matters. Life, death… nothing.

But the punchline, she knows, is that she hilariously feels like she wants to live now… despite being in on the joke. She can’t explain why, but she can feel that want inside of her… even if only distantly.

Suddenly, she’s lurched back into her body as she finds herself violently throwing up the mix of half-digested tablets and capsules, along with the still-cold ice water she had washed the pills down with. Only a few moments must have passed, she thinks to herself, as she slumps into a wretched pile on her bathroom floor.

In stark contrast to her other attempts, this time she keeps it secret. She doesn’t want the forced sympathy it brings.

And while she can sense the heavens mocking her inside her mind’s eye for the rest of her life, it’s fine… she knows they’re just as big of a joke as she is.