-----------------------------------Retelling from MC Perspetive------------------------------
It ended abruptly…
And it ended during the simple act of crossing the street…
No. Actually, correction, it ended before I even started to cross the street. Didn't even had the opportunity to take a step on the crosswalk, when suddenly a van deviated off the road into the sidewalk where I was standing.
Damn my luck… I can't even remember what I wanted to do when I crossed to the other side.
Now… what happened to cause the incident that led me to lose my life as well led to the loss of at least 10 lives besides mine? Maybe something happened to the driver, or maybe something went wrong with the vehicle. Well… I don't know and given the fact that I am dead I never will.
-------------------------------------------"Sigh"------------------------------------------------
I would like to say that I miss my family, friends, materialistic possessions I had in that world, but I would be lying if I said that. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I didn't love my family or friends, or that I hadn't built a life for myself, but how can you say you miss something you can't quite remember…
That's right… Can't remember…
You see, After I died…
I opened my eyes again to see a world void of color. I was… floating in a dark space and beside me I could see that there were other people in the same state, some of them I recognized from the accident, while the rest were complete strangers to me.
Looking around, I also noticed, something different in-between these strangers, mainly I found some people with some…distinctive features… They had some characteristics that you only hear about in some mythologies or some fantasy stories – I am talking about men and women with elongated pointy ears with a transcendent beauty, while others had animal characteristics replacing some part of their bodies like the ears or their nose, sometimes this animal characteristics were added to the existing human form instead of replacing some body part – Tails, I am talking about tails.
Despite the differences, however, I can say we all had something in common – We were all utterly confused by what was happening… Alright, maybe not all of us, some were simple scared, BUT, they were confused before they got scared so it still counts.
Some people started looking around in confusion like me, while others with some apprehension also started examining their surroundings, but all of them were quick to notice something that was common between all of us (besides the confusion, of course) and that something was… the fact that we were all naked as the day we were born, and that besides our nakedness and confusion we also all had a strange translucent shine surrounding us.
I, personally, also noticed that in some people that translucent shine was more pronounced, which really didn't leave me with a sense of ease.
When I tried to open my mouth to communicate with the others I was hit with a splitting headache, that felt like it lasted an eternity before subsiding – Truthfully, at that time, I didn't think too deeply about it, I always had anxiety and stress problems, coupled with the situation I found myself in, an headache wasn't surprising - I got back to trying to communicate only to find out that I couldn't speak and by observing my surroundings I knew I wasn't alone in my discovery.
Someone tried using gestures and we followed the example. It led to nothing (I particularly was terrible at charades)… so instead we started writing letters with our fingers in space. I understood some people, others not so much, I would recognize the letters, but I couldn't make heads or tails of their sentences, or I wouldn't even understand the letters.
In relation to the ones I could communicate with, I went through each person using the same questions – "Where are we?"; "What is happening?", writing letters in space to form sentences. Now logically, one would not expect the answer to these questions to be delivered by someone from among these people that are exactly in the same situation as you, but, after the initial moments of confusion the reality of the situation I was in really started to sink in, and I needed to grasp at something… desperately
Now… it took a long time to go through everyone I could communicate with. First of all, if they had their attention on something else, you had to try to make yourself known when you were in their field of view, which sounded simple, but it was in reality a nightmare when you consider the fact that you had more people competing for their attention.
If you managed to get their interest you had to start writing and that in itself was a test of your patience, it took so long to form a single sentence that by the time you finished you had already forgotten the first letter you wrote, and I don't even want to talk about the possibility of committing errors while making the letters, but the more infuriating thing about this process was the fact that I got the same answer I realistically expected, no one knew where we were or what was happening or at least what was supposed to happen.
After I finished communicating with whom I could, I was hit again with another splitting headache, which again I undervalued, for me it made sense, again, given my reality it was normal that the stress started to creep in.
Similarly to the last headache, this one seemed like it lasted eternally, but it felt more painful compared to the first one, I instinctively used my hands to cover my forehead, as if that would help tone down the pain, and it was then I noticed a phenomenon that truly shattered the calm composure I was trying to maintain.
My hands went through my head.
I immediately returned my hands to their previous position, looked at them, and moved them again to my forehead to see them go through my head again, I took them out of my head and decided to start touching other parts of my body and I quickly realized I couldn't feel anything.
That was my breaking point…
The situation I was in was already bad enough, and now I couldn't even grasp my own body…
"Where was this place?", "Why am I here?", "What even was I at this point? A ghost? Another incorporeal entity?", those were the thoughts running wildly on my mind.
I instinctively curled up in a fetal position, which just aggravated the situation given the fact that I couldn't feel my own skin, this position only felt unnatural and bizarre, but even if it felt surreal I maintained the position though instinct and closed myself in my mind trying to make sense of everything.
I went through a lot of rounds of internal turmoil before another headache hit me, fiercer than the other two before it. I undid my position in the middle of the discomfort, and it was only then I noticed that I wasn't the only one feeling this headache.
I saw the change of expressions in the face of the others, their pain transmitted though their face, visible though the narrowing of their eyes, the lowering of their brows and the wrinkling of their nose.
This headache wasn't normal, it was something that affected us all at the same time and when it ended the translucent shine surrounding us became more pronounced. A bad sign, I was certain, but what was its significance? I didn't know. Despite the weirdness of the headache, I couldn't identify anything different about myself, not counting the more pronounced translucent shine.
Time passed… Impossible to be accounted for in hours, days, weeks or years, and with the passing of time came more headaches that assaulted me in the middle of my despair.
At a certain point, I started becoming more numb to the pain that was inflicted upon me. My expression became stoic, and I stared blanky ahead of me. My thoughts became stagnant, and my emotions were suppressed.
I am certain I would have remained that way if not for the fact that, despite my mind being stagnant, a seemingly random thought made himself know in my head – "What was my biggest regret?"
Then the gears that seemed to have been frozen in time started running again in my head.
"The fact that I didn't say goodbye to my family? Was that my biggest regret? No, I didn't think so… Did I even had a family? Maybe I was an orphan…"
"Maybe my biggest regret was the fact that I didn't have any accomplishment in my past life? No, probably wasn't that either… Did I even had a job?"
I quickly realized that my memories and thoughts were jumbled, and that I had lost a lot of my previous life memories.
And the cause? Those headaches, I was certain of it. I looked around and saw all the others staring blanky ahead with stoic expressions, most of them almost completely translucent and I also noticed something new, a hole in the void.
This hole would open spontaneously below some people, letting them drop out of this space, then it would close and appear again below another person.
An escape? It was my first thought, and I instinctively looked bellow me to see a crack in the space itself, not the same hole the others fell from, but a crack that was spreading… "Not a good sign" I thought.
The space collapsed below me, and I fell…