Two shots of gin, no more and no less. Enough to dull my inhibition, but not enough to reduce accuracy.
It only took a few minutes to clean out the fridge of perishables and even less time to unplug all of the appliances. Even knowing that the gesture would be meaningless, I deep-cleaned every surface in that little apartment. I was meticulous.
Next came the computer. I began the process of deleting everything, scouring every bit of data from the hard drive. It was painful to let go of some of those files, but it was necessary.
The phone was last, and was a much simpler process than the PC. After all of my information was removed, I closed all of my social media accounts. It was the most enjoyable part of the whole night, as they were becoming increasingly bothersome to keep up with. The feeling of liberation was short lived as I recalled that I had twelve email addresses to deactivate.
As I shut them down, I went from newest to oldest. After wading my way through the Google and Yahoo accounts, I eventually made it all the way back to my very earliest one. [email protected]. I couldn't help but smile to myself at the stupid internet handle I clung to for an embarrassingly long time.
To my surprise there were a few emails in the inbox that got past the strict spam filters. Most were banal, like a doctor's appointment verification or direct messages forwarded from old forum sites. Every email was from years ago.
Except for one.
To: [email protected] From: Subject: A Proposal Attachment(s): None
Hello, Damon! (^０^)ノ
Congratulations!!!! You have been selected to participate in our project!!!! (☆▽☆)
Here's our pitch: Has life ever got you down?? Have you ever wished for an escape?? Well, we've got you covered! We can deliver you to another world, chock full of opportunities for adventure! And who knows, maybe you'll find love as well?! ☆⌒(≧▽ ° )
Wonder how we can even do something like that?? Or maybe why would we even offer?? It's a trade secret!~ o(>ω<)o
Just respond to this e-mail with the phrase "I submit my everlasting soul" if you would like to participate in our project. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
Sincerely,
M.
Delivered 5 minutes ago
A virus and a pretty obvious one at that. Though I had never seen a virus that worked when you sent an email response. I couldn't help but be initially affected by the email's promise of a new life, and chided myself for being swayed by something made to cater to mass appeal. Obviously everyone wanted to escape something and that's the only reason it resonated with me. Yet even with that rationale, I found myself tempted.
"Why not?", I muttered, staring at my phone's glowing screen, "It's not like I have any data for them to steal."
With that, I tapped out the requisite response. After clicking "send", I tossed my phone aside.
The time had come. I sighed as I pulled out a shoe box from under the bed. Wordlessly, I swung the ratty container open and grasped the only object inside.
It's funny how cold the sensation of metal against bare skin can be, as if it resents being touched. Funny, it barely weighed over a pound but it felt so damn heavy against my palm. I slowly flipped the switch on its side, deactivating the safety, and pulled the slide back, producing a slight cha-chik as a bullet nestled into the chamber.
I sighed in relief. It was rare for me to get this far. In fact, I could only force myself to actually load it twice out of my five attempts.
As usual, my throat became dry. It wasn't the kind that a drink could fix. I loosened my tie and leaned back in the old recliner, but even those gestures couldn't relax me. My watch told me it was two minutes until midnight.
Those two minutes were agonizingly long. My brain buzzed with activity, filled with no small amount of anxiety and regret. I practiced what I learned and distanced myself from my thought cycles, quietly observing each one like watching a bird from a window. The liquor helped, and I relied on that buzz to place the barrel of the gun to the base of my skull.
The awkward placement was to ensure fatality. 82.5% of shots at this distance would kill. There was a chance if someone did this incorrectly, they would end up in a vegetative state for the rest of their life.
"Why?", the question swirled desperately in my head. The answer wasn't simple. I wish I had a cut-and-dry excuse like being cheated on, losing a job, or having a horrible disease. I guess if I had to boil it down it would be "because I'm not happy". As childish as that may seem, it would be helpful to take a step back and consider a few things. What would you think if your favorite food suddenly had no taste? What if your favorite game all of a sudden became a bore? How would you feel if you lost any way to relate to the people you loved? It would be a shock to lose those things suddenly, but to have them slowly choked out of you over the span of years would be beyond painful. I wasn't stupid, I knew it was depression. I did what everyone says to do - I went to therapy, I took medication, I sought help. I obediently did all those things and yet ... nothing changed. No matter the dosage and variety of medication, no matter how many coping mechanisms I memorized, no matter the length of my therapy sessions, the overwhelming heaviness would not budge an inch. It got to such a point where my family began to believe that I was faking it for attention. Of course they would never say that outright, but I could tell the sentiment lurked behind their pitying expressions.
In the end, I faked a miraculous recovery, immediately dropping all treatment and moving out of state. I got a job and quickly rose in the corporate ladder. I worked 90 hour weeks, not out of any sense of loyalty, but because I needed a distraction. I socialized with my coworkers and colleagues, but kept a polite and respectful distance. When I finally noticed it, I found myself in the position of vice president at the incredibly young age of 24. It was then that I realized that I needed to make a decision. I resigned and used all of my savings to buy my mother and father a new house and pay for my brother's tuition. After years of no contact, they were confused but appreciative. My reasoning was selfish. The happier they were, the longer they would take to look for me.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
I wanted to be numb. My most desperate desire was to wake up and not have that pervasive heaviness clinging to the edges of my vision. But I knew that wasn't possible.
In the end, I attempted and failed it five times. Each instance, I would be stopped by the immense pounding of my heart, my ragged breaths, and my blurring vision. It's easy to forget, but humans are ultimately animals. Animals have the instinct to survive, to savagely fight for the right to live even a moment longer. I was too much of a coward to fight past that instinct. The boiling shame rising in my chest combined with cool relief when I put the gun down those five times.
This time was different. The low rumble of ambient thought grew into a maelstrom of desperation. I was fighting myself again, and my instincts were hollering at me to stop. That quiet room was deafening. Yet even in that mental turmoil, I found something. I found a certain clarity of purpose, like the eye of a hurricane. My thoughts were no less chaotic and my heart still beat furiously, but would it be cliche to say I was at peace with that? It wasn't as if I had dissociated myself from my body or survival instinct, instead I found that I had a profound understanding of them. To say that you had sympathy for yourself would likely land you in mental hospital but there was simply no other way to phrase it. I stopped trying to calm myself down, realizing that I couldn't force the issue. The mind worked in strange ways, often getting angrier when trying to suppress that anger or sadder when dwelling on that sadness.
I let my fear run its course, quietly reminding myself of why I was doing this. It wasn't instantaneous and my trepidation didn't magically evaporate completely, but I had won.
The first rays of sunlight peeked through the curtains, causing me to frown. I had been fighting my internal battle the whole night.
Pulling a trigger isn't hard. I had visited a firing range a few times to reduce my anxiousness around guns. Every visit made me amazed with just how easy it was to unleash a force so deadly. All it took was a little squeeze.
A little squeeze was indeed all it took.
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If you were to research into near death experiences (NDEs), you would find a variety of stories. When on the operating table, some people met their god, some people saw dead loved ones. One of the most common experiences was an all-encompassing and comfortable black void. Of course, all of these stories are the mind trying to create a memory out of chaotic brain activity when so close to death. Obviously, nobody who was actually dead could tell what being dead felt like.
I can't relate it to any sensation. There was no light at the end of the tunnel because I had no eyes. I had no expectations or feelings because I had no complex network of neurons that could form thought.
If I were to make a comparison, what you feel after death is what you feel before you were born. Naturally, memories get fuzzy the further back you look, but there's something hidden at the very start. That start was before you were a fetus, or even before nutrients catalyzed into a sperm cell. It goes further and further beyond that. How far you go is really up to you.
To say something else strange, life and death have a unique relationship. They are obviously opposing forces, but can you really say that life could exist without death or death without life? If one thing couldn't exist without another thing, then they could be categorized as being ultimately the same phenomenon. What is explicitly two, is implicitly one. It's the same with every duality, like good and evil or chaos and order. There can be no heads side on a coin without a tails, so to speak.
No matter how I phrase it, my explanation always sounds like the ravings of a madman, but I can't help it. Dying changes a person.
With a start, I realized that all of these explanations were put into words. No, into thoughts. I had no concept of time when I was dead, so I had no frame of reference, but it felt like ages since I could think. It only took a few moments of marvelling at the sensation for me to deduce something. If I was thinking, then I must have a brain, then I must have been alive again.
"Reincarnation?", I wondered, "Then why can I remember my past life? Something strange is happening."
My outward sensations were muddied and tangled together, taking a herculean effort to perceive that I was even breathing. I took comfort in that and began to assess my situation.
In the end, I decided to patiently but urgently force the issue. I used my breathing as a frame of reference, anchoring myself firmly to my body. After that, my hearing widened to my heartbeat and eventually to low muttering. I could only catch a few words. "Promising", "Eventually", and "King" were the most prominent.
Then came the feeling of touch, telling me that I was incredibly sore and laying on a hard surface. Smell developed next but didn't tell me much, and neither did taste.
My eyesight only relayed darkness. As expected, my eyes were shut. In fact, they were shut so firmly that the eyelids felt more akin to an iron curtain. The most intense of efforts only manage to create a single twitch. I wasn't about to give up there, though. For what felt like weeks, I used every iota of willpower I had to open my eyes. After I was about to give up, they slammed open all at once, flooding my vision with blinding light.
It took me a full minute of blinking past hot tears to adjust. The hard surface I had felt before was the floor of a cave, one that was seemingly slathered all over in what seemed to be luminescent slime. The dull cyan light gave everything an ethereal atmosphere. I found that I could move my body, but only with jerky and weak motions. I propped myself on my forearms and painstakingly sat up.
I was in the center of a circle of bodies, numbering five total including me. Almost immediately, I recognized the group. Have you ever had a few friends when you were younger that you felt very intimately close to? It's often the type of thing that you only experience once in a lifetime. When you know them, you regard them as close, and maybe even closer than your family. Unfortunately, most often that type of group drifts apart over time and even if you're lucky enough to still be in contact with your childhood friends, it's likely that you would say that you aren't as close as you were when you were younger. The four figures around me were my friend group up until eighth grade.
The once short and spunky Erika was still short, with her flame red hair tied back into a ponytail. In a direct contrast to her, Dante had grown tall and burly, his dark skin rippling with a truly impressive musculature. Maria had a new scar across her nose and seemed to have dyed her hair blonde, but otherwise retained her sweet nextdoor neighbor vibe. Finally, Eden was well ... Eden. The boy could only be described as pretty, but if you said that to his face, you would get a punch to the face. His raven black hair was much longer than when I last saw him, reaching down to his shoulders.
A feeling of panic embedded itself in my gut as my worry grew. Just why were we all here? Why was specifically this group here? My mind raced with possibilities, each more outlandish than the last.
"So you're awake", came a sickly sweet voice behind me, "It is unexpected for one to have broken out of sleep this early."
I scooted around 180 degrees as quickly as I could, which was still stupidly slow. Eventually, a woman clad in white robes came into view. She was brain-explodingly, heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Everything from her hourglass figure to her refined and delicate features to her piercing gaze all seemed to draw me in immediately. Her attractiveness was unnatural and it took me a few moments to realize that. What helped me put two and two together was the fact that she was floating a foot in the air.
The woman cocked her head and smiled, before cooing, "You are such an interesting specimen, one that I would greatly enjoy ... playing with. But regretfully, I promised not to tamper with you lot."
I shuddered involuntarily. Her words dripped with venom, contrasting with her appearance.
"I have also promised to explain this all to you", she continued, flitting closer, "But I hate repeating myself. It will be painful, but I will rouse the rest before I begin."
Her wrist flicked and fingers twisted in a strange way, contorting as if they had no joints to hinder their movement.
A ripple of air originated from her palm, splitting four ways and washing over every one of the laying figures. Screams erupted from each of them, echoing painfully loudly in the cavern we all found ourselves in. Thankfully their wails were soon replaced with groans as they each began to stir.
"Ugh ... my head ...", Dante bemoaned, blinking rapidly.
Erika sat up abruptly, eyes half shut.
"You gotta be kidding me", Maria grumbled, tossing over.
It took a while but eventually each of them sat up and began to take in the situation, muttering to themselves. It was only Eden that didn't awake. The anxiety in my stomach only increased as I crawled my way over to him. It had been around ten years since we were all together, but I suppose the bond we formed ran deep.
"Hey, wake up", I managed to choke out, words somewhat garbled.
I shook the guy by the shoulders probably a bit rougher than I meant to due to being out of touch with my body. Still, Eden laid as motionless as a corpse, his skin pale white. Great, the first time I saw my friends in a decade and one of them died in front of me.
"This isn't funny", I found myself growling, "Wake up right now."
His eyes parted slightly and the pit in my gut alleviated somewhat. Still, I took the opportunity to flick his face incessantly, just like he used to do to me.
"Qui- quit it", he protested weakly, emerald eyes fully open now.
I sighed in relief and looked over at the floating woman, who was giggling to herself.
"It seems as if you all are ready so I can begin", she chortled, "Welcome to Nimre, you have been summoned."