"Death is the terrible and secret destiny of all life; you are trapped in a nightmare from which you never stop waking."
POV Kevin
When my organs began to shut down and burst, it reminded me of the pain of the day my bones were shattered in an instant. The harsh, horrible, instantaneous sound, a sharp pain running through my limbs, my body collapsing heavily to the ground. The pain made me howl like a dying animal, pinned to the burning ground and unable to move. My eyes met those of the people around me, who pitied me or were gripped by fear, as if I were an animal in a zoo. Except that instead of a comic show, this one was a tragedy.
I wanted to ask them for help, but only my screams of pain could come out. A moment I hoped never to relive in my life, but after a long lull, it was my organs' turn to torment me.
The first organ to burst was my genitals; I remember a sound like ice cracking. And after a few seconds of incomprehension, my brain understood what had just happened as my pants filled with blood. I screamed even louder than when my bones had broken, clutching my crotch, which burned as if real flames were being held to it. I gathered all my strength so that this time I could call someone.
"Mom!" I screamed.
She came running and, seeing the blood, easily understood that something was happening to me again. She called an ambulance without wasting a single second, and I was hospitalized. My organs gave out one by one over several months, causing pain I had never even imagined. Extremely painful? No, it went far beyond that: it was torture, torment, an agony without end. As if thousands of knife wounds were being inflicted on me every second, causing an intense burning sensation that radiated through all my limbs and triggered involuntary muscle contractions for hours and entire days. And yet I tried to keep smiling for my loved ones, to tell them I was fine, that I would pull through, and above all to avoid seeing them cry, to avoid seeing them suffer even more at the sight of my own suffering.
This torment for me and my loved ones lasted one long year, at the end of which the pain and the noise finally stopped; I felt myself falling into the void, my eyes plunged into darkness, at peace. But even in that peace my mind never stopped questioning: where was I falling? Where was I? Why had the pain and the noise stopped?
I was unable to see my own body, unable to move it. Fragments of memories came back to me, voices, images. I was lying in the hospital bed, overwhelmed by pain despite all the drugs they were putting into my body so it would hurt less. The awakened and the machines were trying to keep me alive while my organs failed one by one, causing intense pain each time. But despite that pain breaking my body and my mind, there was something I could hold on to: I could feel the presence of my mother and my sister.
I could feel the warmth of their bodies on me from time to time: kisses on my forehead, them lying on my chest, the warmth of their hands on mine. The sound of their voices reached me in fragments; they told me different things: hold on, fight, if you survive, we can go out, play, eat ice cream together.
"Ah, how I'd love to go eat ice cream with you," I thought.
But everything suddenly stopped. I tried to call my mother, but no sound came out. The only thing within my reach was the darkness and the sensation of floating, of falling without the slightest end. I was trapped in a place with no light and no sound, a dark chasm whose edges and bottom could not be seen.
"So this is death."
That was the conclusion I had come to as my body kept falling into that infinite dark chasm. I lost myself in my thoughts about what I had lived through, about what I had put my family through. Maybe if I hadn't been born, they wouldn't have suffered so much. I saw again the wounded look and the tears of my mother and my sister, but I also remembered their warm smiles full of joy when I was healthy. The movie theater, with its popcorn and its films that fired my imagination; the outings, especially the one to the aquarium where you could walk under the water while watching the fish. Sports, with my sister and my classmates, where I could run until I was exhausted, the joys of victory and defeat. All those brief moments of happiness that would never come back, since I could never grow up with my family. And my father, who hadn't been there for my last moments, more preoccupied with work than with the health of his sick son.
Maybe I was too heavy a burden for him. One of the few memories I have with him is a walk in a beautiful park, where we saw all kinds of animals and ate cotton candy sitting on the cool grass. At the end of the day, as the sun was setting, he was holding my hand. That rare moment spent with my father was a blessing, and I suddenly told him that I loved him.
"I love you, Dad."
He stopped while the crowd was also heading for the exit, then he turned around before kneeling down. My eyes opened wide, because in front of me, my father was in tears, and then he hugged me tightly.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," my father said, his voice weak and filled with palpable sadness.
And that is how that day ended, and how my father drifted even further away from the family and from me.
As I kept sinking, all my questions, all my doubts, all my experiences resurfaced in my head one after another, tied to memories, emotions, sensations, going on and on. Then, over time, it became harder and harder for me to focus on my thoughts, and even the notion of time escaped me. Without the slightest point of reference, without the slightest sound, without anything, my mind slowly began to drift.
Time slipped by, a time of which I no longer had the slightest notion; I didn't even know how long had passed here. An hour, a day, a week, a month, a year—I had no idea, and the further it went, the more I sank and the more disordered my mind became. In a survival reflex, I started counting, doing simple additions like:
- One plus one equals two.
- Two plus two equals four.
- Three plus three equals six.
- Four plus four equals eight.
- Five plus five equals ten.
Then, as I repeated the exercise, it started to become more and more difficult. Each calculation, however easy, demanded inhuman concentration, and every instant felt like an eternity. I made my first mistake, a mistake that became many mistakes. My mind had become incapable of what had once been so easy, and the more I tried, the more the drifting very slowly turned into madness. A fog gradually settled in my head, the stress increased, while my concentration and alertness dwindled. With all of that combined, a deep anger rose up against myself: I was unable to solve such simple calculations. I howled with rage with all my strength, but no sound came out; I screamed even louder with the same result.
And this happened again and again. From rage I moved on to sadness, but none of my sobs could come out. And so I began to lament my fate. Why was I here? Had I deserved this? Isn't death supposed to be rest and not torment?
And so I ended up wanting to sleep, as if my mind were trying to protect itself from the madness that was slowly overtaking it. The worst came when I realized I couldn't. Despite being plunged into total darkness, sleep fled from me like the plague. And the more I tried in vain to sleep, the more I felt that my poor mind, barely 10 years old, was now reaching its limit.
"Help me, please!"
But here the only person who could hear my cries for help was myself. Sleepiness, anger, stress, distress, loneliness and fear mixed together to form what we call despair.
And I began to howl, to scream, to call for help again, again, again, again, again and again.
"Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me!"
My mind was starting to fall apart, my cries for help mixing with nervous, chilling, psychotic laughter.
"Please! Please, help me! Ah! Ahh! Ahh! What… Ahh! Save… Me… What is this hell? Somebody help me, please."
My mind, plunged into the depths of despair, was beginning to embrace madness. And then a black smoke, so black and so thick it could have suffocated me, began to gather in front of me. After a while, it took full shape: a humanoid being that froze my blood. Looking at it, I lost myself in the blackness that made its being the tangible manifestation of a supernatural decay. It evoked the unknown, mystery, anguish, searching, ignorance, terror, loneliness, and a chaos of infinite darkness. My broken mind was terrified, but madness had made its home in me, and this thing was the only thing cutting me off from loneliness.
I quickly welcomed its heavy presence with open arms and imagined touching it. I raised my arm, then my index finger, and, as if it could know what I was thinking, the thing did the same. When our index fingers touched, the darkness of the thing poured into me. At that moment I could feel extreme heat and extreme cold, two completely opposite things, and as it poured into my body, which had been invisible until then, my body began to materialize.
It was as if it were creating a brand-new body for me so I could exist in this dark, bottomless void.
Before my body was completely rebuilt, I thought I heard a voice so dark, so chilling and so powerful that my body began to tremble.
"And so, through this first descent into the abyss, the black work continues its course."
The darkness slowly faded as my eyelids opened. I saw my mother and my sister looking at me in amazement, their eyes wet. They took me in their arms in a soft, warm embrace.
Thirteen days had passed between my death and my return.
"The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to the grave and raises up." (1 Samuel 2:6)
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