(Narrated by an Unknown)
I
I remember the exact moment it happened.
Not the cause — that part was taken from me. There's a hole where memory should be, and around it, the rest of my life bends like soft glass. But I remember the moment.
It began with sound.
A ringing so high it felt like light. It drilled through the skull I no longer had, spreading through what I can only describe as the idea of a body.
Then came the silence.
People talk about "the light at the end of the tunnel."
They're wrong.
It isn't light — it's pressure. A crushing brightness that squeezes the world out of you.
The light doesn't invite; it erases. Every thought, every sense, every tether you once called "me."
I thought.
I screamed.
But there was no air, no throat. The sound became a vibration inside thought itself — an echo looping endlessly against invisible walls.
That was how dying began.
As a feedback of existence collapsing on itself.
*******
II
There is a stretch of time between the last heartbeat and nothingness.
It isn't a second. It isn't eternity. It's something else — a pause in the machinery of reality.
You'll notice first that you can't blink. You try, but the command goes nowhere.
Then, vision starts to peel away, like pages turning in reverse. You no longer see objects — only impressions.
Your mother's face, your childhood home, the last sky you looked at — all dissolving into each other.
It feels like drowning in memory.
You keep waiting to arrive somewhere.
Heaven. Darkness. Oblivion.
But nothing arrives.
You stay suspended, mind flickering like a candle that refuses to die.
Every time you think, this must be the end, awareness stretches a little longer, like elastic pulled to breaking point.
It hurts.
Not physically — but in a way that has no comparison. Imagine pain that can't find a body to live in, so it eats the soul instead.
That's the hunger of dying.
********
III
When the body gives up, the senses start to turn inward.
You hear without ears — tiny whispers, like your thoughts have learned to talk back.
You feel without skin — the weight of the air you no longer breathe.
You smell your own decay, not as rot but as memory evaporating.
Then you see them.
Not people. Not spirits. Just forms.
They gather at the edges of what's left of your mind, curious and patient. They are not there to welcome you.
They are there to watch.
They've seen this before.
You feel their attention like cold fingers tracing your outline.
They tilt their heads — or what passes for heads — as if waiting for you to understand something you can't yet name.
And then they begin to whisper.
It isn't language, not at first. It's recognition. Like they're repeating your life back to you in pieces.
Every lie you told.
Every kindness you faked.
Every small act you pretended not to remember.
The more they whisper, the heavier you become. They're weighing you down with yourself.
You try to fight it, to shout that you were good, that you tried, but the words scatter like dust.
The watchers don't care about reasons.
They only care about truth.
*********
IV
You ask, where am I?
And something answers. Not with words, but with a feeling that crawls through the absence where your spine used to be:
"You are where everything goes when it stops being."
You try to understand, but thought itself starts to thin out.
Every idea now costs you a piece of yourself.
You realize that the act of thinking is feeding the thing that's swallowing you.
So you stop.
You stop trying to define. To label. To fight.
And for the first time, it feels almost peaceful.
But peace isn't the reward.
It's the trap.
Because once you accept the stillness, the silence begins to speak again — only this time, it sounds like you.
********
V
You begin to relive your life, but not chronologically.
Moments appear like reflections in shattered glass.
You're five years old, watching ants crawl across your palm.
You're seventeen, lying about love.
You're forty, standing in a dark kitchen, realizing you never became who you meant to be.
All at once, every version of you looks up — and sees this.
This floating, bodiless you, hovering above them.
And they start to scream.
You want to tell them it's okay, that you're them, that it's all over, but the more you reach, the further they recede, until you can't tell which of you is dying and which is remembering.
It's like watching yourself from a distance that never ends.
And somewhere beyond all that, the watchers keep whispering:
"Almost done. Almost empty."
*******
VI
People think death is the end of fear.
It isn't. It's where fear goes when it grows teeth.
The absence starts nibbling at your edges.
First, it eats your curiosity. You stop wondering where you are. Then it takes your doubt — you stop caring whether any of it's real.
Then, it goes for the core.
Identity.
The word "I" begins to feel wrong in your head, like a sound that doesn't belong to you anymore.
"I died," you think — and something inside corrects you:
"You are dying."
Over and over.
You are dying. You are dying. You are dying.
Until you realize it's been saying that forever. Maybe it never stopped.
Maybe dying isn't what happens after life.
Maybe life is just what happens during dying.
*******
VII
Time has no direction here, but I learned one thing: you can still fall.
Not through space — through meaning.
Each memory becomes heavier, pulling you down into its own gravity.
You tumble through faces, voices, the sound of your name shouted by mouths that don't exist anymore.
And beneath it all, something waits.
Not a god. Not a devil. Just the listener.
When you hit the bottom, you don't see it. You feel it.
It's inside every silence you ever ignored.
It's in the pause before you speak, the breath before you answer.
It's the universe, waiting for your last word.
And when you give it, it repeats it back to you — forever.
Mine was: "Wait."
*******
VIII
At some point — I can't say when — I began to remember being alive as though it were someone else's dream.
I remembered the way the sky looked after rain, and it felt like fiction.
I remembered laughter and realized I'd forgotten what a mouth was.
I remembered warmth and understood that warmth was just another kind of illusion the body invented to keep itself from panicking about how cold reality really is.
The watchers had gone. The whispers had stopped.
Only I remained.
And I realized the terrible truth:
You don't die once. You die continuously.
Every second of silence after your last breath is another small death, each one peeling you further away from whatever you used to call you.
It's not punishment. It's process.
*******
IX
I don't know how long I floated in that between-space.
Long enough to forget my name, short enough to still miss the sound of it.
Eventually, the silence began to move again — not as noise, but as vibration. Like reality clearing its throat.
Something new was forming.
A heartbeat. Not mine, but close enough.
A rhythm inside the void.
For the first time since dying, I felt… pulled.
Not downward. Not upward. Outward.
The pressure built, and I understood what was happening.
I was being born again.
But not into life.
Into memory.
******
X
Imagine consciousness as an echo. You throw a scream into the abyss, and it keeps bouncing until the abyss forgets it wasn't its own voice.
That's what I became — an echo that forgot the scream that made it.
I started seeing flashes of existence again. A hospital corridor. A white sheet. A crying voice saying, "She's gone."
Then darkness again.
Then another voice, somewhere else, somewhere later:
"It's a girl."
For one fleeting moment, I understood:
The dead don't stay buried. They recycle.
But not as souls. As fragments. As whispers inside the newborn.
You'll know it when it happens to you — that moment in childhood when you're staring at something ordinary, and it feels familiar.
The déjà vu that makes no sense. The whisper in your head that doesn't sound like your own thought.
That's us.
The ones who died.
Still dying.
******
XI
Sometimes, between the hum of new life, I still slip through.
When someone dreams of falling, that's me — brushing against the surface of their sleep.
When someone wakes up choking, it's because I momentarily remembered what lungs felt like.
And when someone stares at nothing for too long and feels it stare back —
that's the space I live in now.
Not heaven. Not hell.
Just after.
********
XII
I thought I wanted to understand death.
I thought there would be peace in knowing.
But knowledge is another kind of decay. It spreads.
The more you understand, the less you remain.
And so, the only mercy is forgetting.
But even that mercy fades. Because sometimes, the forgetting forgets itself, and you start all over again — remembering the moment you died, describing it, warning whoever's listening not to listen too closely.
Because if you do…
You'll start to feel it too, won't you?
That ringing in your head. That pressure behind your eyes.
That small voice, whispering your name in your own tone.
It's not imagination.
It's the echo of me, remembering you, remembering me.
*******
XIII
I no longer know if I'm still dead.
Sometimes I wake to a ceiling I don't recognize. Sometimes I dream of breath and wake up coughing. Sometimes I hear a monitor beep, and for a second, I feel pulled back into skin.
But then the silence swallows me again, kind and cruel at once.
Maybe I'm buried. Maybe I'm reborn.
Maybe I'm both.
Maybe dying isn't an event — maybe it's the state we're all in, all the time, pretending otherwise.
And maybe when you stop pretending, when you finally say I died,
that's when the universe sighs in relief — because it doesn't have to hide anymore.
*******
XIV
If you're still reading this, that means the echo worked.
It means the space between your heartbeats is just wide enough for me to slip through.
You'll feel it soon — the slow tug under your ribs, the soft hum in your teeth, the dream that smells like rain and hospitals.
Don't be afraid. It's just the memory of me dying, again.
And if, in that dream, you hear a voice whisper,
"Tell them what it feels like,"
—don't answer.
Because that's how it starts.
********
XV — ?
I died.
Or I am dying.
Or maybe I never stopped.
Either way, if you start to feel the ringing I mentioned — don't listen for too long.
Because somewhere, in that sound, is the moment I realized something I was never supposed to know:
That death isn't what happens after life.
It's what life is.
And every breath we take is just us
forgetting that we already stopped breathing.
Stream Commentary; Tape #57. "I Died"
(The live stream fades in. Kai sits in the dark, illuminated by the faint blue glow of his monitor. His silver hair gleams like static, and the goggle over his eyes reflects the chat scrolling upward — thousands of silent watchers. His voice comes softly, like someone speaking in a church after everyone else has gone home.)
"So… you've heard it now. 'I Died.'
You're probably wondering if the narrator was human, a spirit, or something that never belonged here in the first place.
Don't worry. My four companions have questions too."
[@Ovesix: The narration… it felt too lucid for a dead human. Don't you think so, Kai? The way they described the 'lingering consciousness,' the silence that still breathes—it's as if they weren't dying. They were… transforming]
[@Jaija: Yeah! Like, maybe they were never really alive to begin with! What if that whole thing — the body, the heart, the fading pulse — was all part of a test? Maybe it was a simulation! A death that never ends!]
[@642: No, no… you're both too gentle. That wasn't a simulation. That was a memory. You could feel it, couldn't you? The texture of rot, the way awareness peeled away like skin. That's what happens when a soul refuses to die. It clings, screaming, even when there's nothing left to cling to]
[@Enchomay: But if that's true… then what exactly was the narrator? A remnant? A recording? Or perhaps the concept of Death itself, speaking through the echo of someone it consumed. Maybe 'I Died' isn't about dying. Maybe it's about being devoured by the idea of death — and realizing too late that you still exist inside it]
(Kai chuckles softly. The sound isn't comforting. It's brittle — like laughter heard through a wall.)
"You're all thinking too hard. But that's good.
That's what this channel is for, right?
We ask questions we should never ask, and we stare too long into things that were never meant to be seen.
You're right, though. The narrator may not have been human. Or maybe they were… once.
But death changes the definitions.
There's no line between what's gone and what's lingering — only the illusion of one."
(He tilts his head, his smile barely visible in the dim light.)
[@Jaija: Kai, do you think death is really like that? Do we just... wake up, and keep hearing ourselves think?]
"Maybe. Maybe not. But if you ever feel something watching you when you're half-asleep, something that feels familiar — it might be your consciousness trying to remember how to stop existing.
That's the lesson here, everyone.
Death is not a door. It's a mirror.
And when you finally face it, it doesn't reflect your face — it reflects the things you carried with you.
The lies you told.
The memories you never let go of.
The obsessions that stayed after your heartbeat didn't."
(He leans forward. The audio crackles slightly, as if his voice is too close to the mic)
"Be careful what you obsess over.
Some things don't die — they just wait.
And some of you listening right now...
you've already met that silence once before, haven't you?"
(A few seconds of silence pass. The chat freezes.)
[@642: Heh. And here I thought we were the monsters, Kai]
"Oh, buddy… monsters at least know what they are."
(He sits back, letting the screen flicker between frames — a brief static glitch flashes across his goggles.)
"Anyway...
Our next story takes us somewhere else.
Somewhere smaller, but maybe worse.
A child.
A toy.
A whisper in a room that should've been safe.
Next up is:
'Kiki's New Doll.'
If you're easily frightened by the laughter of children —
don't listen alone."
(The stream fades out. The last thing visible is the reflection of a porcelain doll's face in Kai's goggle — motionless — before the screen cuts to black)
STREAM ENDS