A funny thing happened to me today. I woke up on a crosswalk surrounded by a few dozen people who all looked petrified. Their darkened eyes were taunting me and many covered their mouths.

I looked around.

The skies were stained red behind me, the windows were fogged with steam.

Nothing unusual.

I shifted my gaze to the right, where a man with large, black robes approached me. His face was pale and almost skeletal. I thought he looked terrifying, but I just shrugged it off.

Getting up, I dusted myself off and began to walk away. I slipped through an empty window of people and it began to rain. As I ran further and further from the scene, the weather got colder and colder. I wiped my brows and something caught my attention– I was cold, too. A lingering feeling of being followed almost startled my still heartbeat and I turned to look. Behind me was the man who had approached me earlier, and he was warm. Like a fire, I could feel his heat even from a distant presence. I found it strange that he had the same destination as me. You see, the only thing down this street that was the slightest bit interesting was, well, my house.

‘No, stop it,’ I told myself, ‘Nothing you do will bring you back.’

Bring me back?

I walked faster and faster. I thought he might be following me. I hurried down the pavement, a gloomy light illuminating my path. Where was I going?

‘I’m going home. I’m going home. This is not home, I don’t like it here. Where is this? I grew up here. Where?’

I looked back at the world. The rain trickling down rooftops, the flocking echo of crows leaving the trees. A land departed from the grave.

Denial.

The man behind me sped up. I grinned at him, a sharp pain stabbing my gums. Something exited my lips. ‘Was that the rain?’ I thought. My eyes began to blur. My head rang against the thickness of my skull.

Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day.

I looked around. No more men laughing outside pubs, no silhouettes through foggy windows. 

I swung open the small gate to my garden. The flowers were colourless, meaningless, and bland. The rain does so much to the world. As I stood on the small stone path leading to the entrance of my door, I felt the dreaded touch on my shoulder. 

He caught up to me. He saved me. He saved me!

As my body regained a previous, precious warmth– or embraced a frosty cold, it hit me.

I finally realised. 

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath as my heart became one and my body disappeared. 

Yes, that’s right.

I was returning home from work when a vehicle hit me. It ended my story there. 

When I woke up, I was no longer human. Just a spirit in denial. I saw my blood all over the sky because that was the last thing I saw. I ran away through a gap in the crowd and left all of my life there. The people were a gateway where my soul could not split– a net that caught the dead because they were living. 

I tried running home to fulfill my final purpose. I thought it would save me from this state. When I smiled at the man, the last of my blood escaped my human lips. I guess to reject one’s death is to disregard all the intricacies of life. I was too in denial of my situation that I could no longer recognise where I was: the land that prohibits life. 

The lifeless, blossoming flower was what I saw last: a red beauty I had planted when I was young and not beyond cursed horizons. It had soft petals, once. It stood strong and mighty. Its stalk was green and its petals the color of my beating heart. Once beating.

I didn’t think it was really raining, either.

I was on the path to the afterlife, and the man was Death. I was a spirit in denial walking towards a destined ending. 

Quite strange, it is. To die is a gift.

Image credit: saatchiart.com/paintings