"Within the darkness is a light, each time, barely there. Just enough to keep me grasping at straws, reaching further and further to try and grip the light. Sometimes I fall, getting further away from the light, less willing to leave the emptiness. But no matter what, I go back to the light. I don't want to be forgotten, to disappear and never know what could have been." -C921Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHcLJL1XR6f
You can't understand the feeling of death. No true mortal or immortal can. When you're gone, you're gone. There is no "Heaven," there is no "Hell," there's only the black. The emptiness of a vessel gone to rest. It is complete, it overtakes all, it is eternal. All worlds come from the black, and to the black they will return. But you can't understand that, because you would be dead, and therefore unable to notice the black. That is, excluding one person.
A paintbrush stroke collided with a nearly blank canvas, smearing a long, thin stroke of a pale, fleshy pink. Another, and several more. The strokes eventually formed into a vague ovalish shape, and then another layer placed on top of it formed a nose and mouth. The brush disappeared now, replaced with a thicker one, its strokes a woody shade of brown. It formed smooth, long strokes that seemed to bounce away from the flesh-covered oval, lathering the canvas with a thick coating of paint where moments prior there had been none. Several minutes of carefully constructed strokes later, there was hair upon the blank fleshy head. And there it would wait, drying for the next day.
He stepped back from his painting, looking at it almost expressionless. His face was tight and worn, as if it had been used for several times longer than it was intended. Soft, tired eyes of an ugly mud color looked upon the painting, the pain he felt from seeing the outline of the face he once loved only visible in his eyes. Anyone who saw him would say he looked not a day over sixty. The man turned around and looked at the sunset in the distance, watching the orb of light sink beneath the wooded horizon miles off. He would sit down in long grass, feeling it brush against his arms. He had been painting in the center of a large field, the grass stretching for miles on all sides of him. His sandy blond hair just barely poked above the tallest of the grasses as he sat, and when he laid down the grass surrounded him entirely. It would be days before anybody found his body, if he stayed here and died. Thoughts akin to that plagued him often, almost as often as her face did.
He sat back up as the sky darkened, only a sliver of the sun still giving the worlds above him a slight purple tint. The man grabbed the painting he had been worked on with one hand and the paints he had in the other and began walking away, leaving the easel that had held the painting behind. As he walked away, it fell into nothingness, dissolving into the dust it had been created from as the paintbrushes had. An old, rusty, beat up car (a 1980 Chevy Malibu) waited for him on a gravel road that had brought him into the field. He opened the car with his hand after sliding the paints to the crook of his elbow, then dropped them into the back seat, taking care not to spill any. He didn't know if he could clean paint out and didn't want to try either. He set the painting in the passenger's side front seat and sat down himself, turning on the old car as he did. The wheels spun for a moment, attempting to gain traction before he actually managed to get going.
It wasn't long before his mind was wandering away from driving. They wandered to the man's past, his long and tiring tale with no true point as far as he could see. He had lost more than most could ever gain, lived a thousand lives and loved but one person throughout it all. One person, one face- His internal monologue was cut short by the sound of loud honking from ahead of him on the road.
The man's mind returned to him, but too late. After wandering for several minutes, his car had drifted into the wrong lane of the road, and he had been gradually increasing in speed as he went. A truck was in front of him, not slowing down itself, the driver expecting the man to swerve himself. Instead of that, however, the man shouted in fear and slammed down on the brakes. His car wheels immediately began burning across the road, but he didn't turn. The cars collided at high speeds, the Malibu crumpling under the force of the blow. Its driver slammed into the front of the vehicle as it stopped, the seat belt doing absolutely nothing to protect him. The pain washed over his body, along with the shattered windshield and various broken bits of engine. His form was cut and slashed, and he thought he could feel something stabbed into his chest. The man looked down just in time to see something spilling out of his body. Not the traditional red of blood, soaking into his shirt, but a sandy substance. He just barely felt the vehicles stop moving before he lost consciousness.
His vision faded in and out, blurry, his head spinning. He could see blinding lights, rushing past above him. Or was he rushing past beneath them? He couldn't tell. Thinking was getting hard for him. His head tipped to the side, and he could see a person's midsection. They were clothed in what looked to be a pale blue dress? Their hand was gripping a handle near the edge of whatever he was laying on. Just as he began hearing frantic shouting, his hearing returning to him, once again, his vision faded to black.
He woke up to people leaning over him. Doctors? They were dressed in a similar pale blue as the person earlier, including face masks. Was one of them the one they saw? As they realized he was awake again, they placed something onto his face, and he returned to the blackness again.
He felt tired. He was done here, his life wasn't important. Perhaps it was best if he simply remained asleep. Didn't wake back up. He relaxed through the intense pains of the cuts and breaks within his body, accepting his fate. There would always be another time for him to fight. Another time for him to try and survive. This time he didn't need to stay awake. A soft smile would appear on his face, serenity, even if he could barely tell it existed through his unconsciousness. The pain faded slightly, not by much, but then ended entirely.
To the doctors, they would see something unique, something that they never had and never would see again in their meager mortal lives. Their patient's form began dissolving as his heartbeat stopped, and over the course of the minute his entire body had dissolved into dust, floating up into the air, and then dispersing into the nothingness around him. His body was gone, and would mystify the doctors and surgeons of the town for years to come.
But the man was not gone, not quite. His body had died and returned to the nothingness he had come from. He was surrounded by black, nothingness absorbing him. The only thing he could feel was a small feeling in between his shoulder blades. A feeling of warmth, an offer of belonging. A suggestion, really. An offer for him to come with, to find a new home. It was nothing new to him. Every death was the same. A returning to the dark, then an offer of a new home. Every time it was a lie. Each new world he was brought to had given him nothing but heartbreak. Some pains worse than others, the ones coming the closest to homes being the worst offenders.
Each time though, despite his better judgement, he accepted the offer. Took another chance with life. He shouldn't have, but every time, no matter what, he did. And this time was no different. He brought the warmth into him and it filled him, its essence merging with his own. Then it became cold, as he and the offer became one. And then, the black faded away and sense returned to him as he was brought into another world, unfamiliar to him.
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