Have you ever wondered what happens when you die?

The answer to that question has been the focal point of many arguments as far back as the recorded history of humanity could take us. The earth, wide and varied, is home to many different human beings, all with differing cultures and ideals. Every one of those cultures, almost without fail, has an explanation about what happens in death. From the biggest bastions of civilization to the most isolated of tribes.

To prove a point, let’s take the two most widespread religions - Christianity and Islam. The two religions alone are followed by the majority the world's population. In them death is represented by Heaven and Hell - the afterlife. The plane of paradise and the plane of eternal suffering.

Then, let’s take the third most widespread religion - Hinduism. A believer would tell you that humans take part in a cycle of death and rebirth called the Samsara. That when a person dies their self is reborn in a different body.

Two completely different answers to the same question. It’s an interesting phenomenon. All religions describe some sort of an afterlife. That death is not the end of one's journey. Maybe it’s escapism, the natural tendency of humans to seek distraction from the brutality of reality, maybe it’s something else completely…

Still, there are some that are non-religious, or simply do not believe that an afterlife exists even if they are.

A day ago Maximillian was one of those people, those that were convinced that death truly was the end of the line.

But that was a day ago.

‘Where am I?’

Confusion. That was the thing that filled his mind immediately upon waking up. Opening his eyes Maximillian tries to look around though nothing but darkness greets him in return.

He tries to move his neck, only to fail. He attempts to move his limbs, this time to moderate success, but there was something amiss, the sensation of touch felt odd to him, nothing like what he was used to. He doesn’t question why, as something of much higher importance suddenly pops up in his mind.

‘Why can I think? I’m supposed to be dead right now!’

The fog in his mind instantly clears up as he recalls what had happened to him mere seconds ago, to his senses at least.

‘Yes. I remember quite clearly now. Curiosity killed the cat as they say, instead of ignoring the pillar of smoke and fire produced by the burning tanker truck and continuing my day I stayed and observed what would happen… at what I believed to be a safe distance. It wasn’t the explosion that killed me. Not directly at least.’

‘Out of nowhere came a slab of metal, spinning in the air like a frisbee, it had most likely broken off of the tanker truck during the explosion. It simply crossed the distance and…cleaved me in half. Around three hundred feet of distance. What are the odds, even.’

‘My last memory. Laying there on the pavement, stunned, looking at my lower half lifelessly laying there a few feet away, a pool of blood expanding slowly but surely like an animal being bled by the butcher.’

Maximilian cuts off the train of thought as intense feelings of dread and fear fill up his soul.

‘Better not think about it, focus on something else, focus on the present.’

He attempts to move his limbs for a second time, although it is incredibly tiring he feels his arms shifting by the tiniest amount. As they shift he feels something he recognises.

‘Cloth.’

‘Am I still alive then? I’ve got no clue whether that’s a good or a bad thing. I’m certain that the cut was high enough for me to lose a large part of my intestines. Living without the lower part of my body..? Will I be forced to eat some sort of a weird filtered food for the rest of my life from now on? Maybe even requiring to have nutrients injected directly into my bloodstream.'

‘Depressing. And It's not like I have anybody to take care of me.’

Maximilian considered how those around him would react once they heard of the news, they most likely wouldn’t care. He’s an orphan anyways so no family to speak of. Maybe his colleagues in the company would care, though that is merely wishful thinking. Maximilian knows that they wouldn’t. At most they’d give him a ‘passing glance’, maybe deliver him some flowers when he’s at the hospital. They visit him, they exchange a couple of words, and they leave never to be seen again.

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Even then the reason they’d do it would be self serving, rather than to make him feel better. After all, as small of a part of their lives as Maximillian had been, he’d still been a part of it. Most would feel an unpleasant weight on their mind for the rest of their lives if they left him for dead without even a word.

So, go in, have a pleasant conversation, then leave. Never to meet him again.

It’s definitely what Maximillian would have done had the situation been reversed with somebody else.

'Depressing.'

‘Still, this makes no sense. There’s no coming back after losing that much blood and sustaining that much damage. No matter how advanced medicine has gotten in the last decade, I have a good understanding of what's possible and what is impossible.

Unless there’d been an ambulance I had failed to notice right behind me, packed full with liters of blood and the best surgeon this world has ever seen I don’t see myself surviving that.’

‘Yet here I am.’

He decides that there’s no point in wondering about it as the truth will reveal itself eventually, deciding to put his mind to work on something else.

‘I can’t see anything at all and my neck feels like it’s made of stone but I can move my eyeballs around in my socket, that has to count for something. The lights are probably shut off, it’s pitch black here. As to my auditory senses, I can’t hear anything, it’s like I’m hearing things from underwater. Everything is just muffled…’

Maximilian is startled as he feels something - something he shouldn’t be able to, considering the situation he believes to be in.

I swear to god, my left foot just got tickled.

Maximilian, having ample reason to believe that he’d lost the lower part of his body, is momentarily stunned by this new bit of information.

‘No way! This has to be some sort of a phantom sensation. I feel it but it is not really there, my mind playing tricks on me…’

He is blinded by a sudden increase in the light level.

‘...What is happen—’

He could not finish his line of thought as he is lifted high in the air, although he cannot see or hear properly he still has his sense of balance while also being able to feel the air rushing past the skin of his body.

‘I can’t see shit! Everything is bright white and muddled, there is light but I can’t focus my eyes! Were they damaged somehow? What happened, did the ambulance crash?’ Frustrated, he curses in his mind.

‘Calm down. You can still think and you’re not in pain so everything’s alright, unless you're drugged to the gills...Damn it. Focus and try to find out what’s happening.’

First, Maximilian tries to move his legs, something he'd been about to do before being interrupted.

‘I can’t move them but I can most definitely feel them! Holy Jesus! Did I hallucinate that whole event? Maybe that chunk of metal had just torn into me instead of cleaving me in half like I imagined. Great amounts of stress can easily induce visual illusions in people.’

‘No time to think about that, I’ll do it later. Next…’

Giddy with excitement over the fact that he may not be crippled for the rest of his life he tries to focus on the world around him.

‘I’m bobbing up and down! Meaning that I am in a stretcher? I still can’t focus my eyes but I’m almost certain that I can pick out a person’s silhouette.’

Close to a minute passes as such. Maximilian, confused and expectant, wondering where he is, trying to explain to himself the odd chain of events that he has found himself in. Eager for an explanation.

His body being cleaved in two, only for him to once again feel his legs and lower abdomen. The partial loss of his sight and hearing. The odd feeling that he feels all throughout his body. The sense of touch not the tiniest bit like what he is used to. His limbs, weak and easily tired from the slightest movement, feel foreign to him.

All of those bits of information just didn’t add up for Maximilian. His best explanation being that his spine is damaged, in turn altering the sensations he feels.

It was then that something happened, something that arranged every single piece of that weird puzzle for him to clearly see.

‘Oh, we stopped moving? Am I in a hospi–’

He felt something gently brushing against his cheek, the touch of another person’s skin against his own.

‘...What? I saw that. It was a human hand, I could see its silhouette. But…’

He gulps. Hearing the sound loudly and clearly despite his impaired auditory senses as it resonates inside his head.

‘Why was it so large? It must have been several times the size of my own head.’

When his face was pressed against warm flesh, flesh that has a form he is familiar with, he truly understood what had happened. His mind connecting the dots.

‘No…’

A strange feeling spread through him, as if ants made of the coldest of ice had started to crawl along the length of his spinal column.

‘No! No! No! No! No! No!’

Slowly that feeling spread. From his spine, to his limbs, and then to his extremities. Everything.

‘Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!’

Being a tad bit more forcefully pressed against the flesh Maximilian was pushed over the edge.

‘Noooooooooo!!!’

Well, there is only one way for a baby to make its displeasure known.

That was the first time Maximilian truly wept from the bottom of his heart.

The eustachian tube is an organ that connects the middle ear to the back of a person’s throat. In order to hear properly the middle ear needs to be filled with air, though, where can one find air in a mother’s womb?

Because of that when a baby is born the middle ear is filled with fluid, some time is required to pass before the fluid drains out and the middle ear is filled with air.

That combined with the fact that their ears are underdeveloped at such an early stage of life it means that newborn babies are partially deaf. That’s why they respond best to high-pitched, exaggerated voices.

To top it off - a newborn baby can barely see, they cannot perceive colour and all objects appear blurry to them. At such an early stage of development they can only make out silhouettes and light levels, seeing only in black and white.

All in all, I'm not someone deeply involved with medicine and could have gotten something wrong. I did this research in order for this chapter to be more immersive. It's actually surprising how little newborns could actually see or feel.