My name is Keith Rains... or was to be proper. You see, I'm dead. Yes, I'm really dead. How do I know that? Well if you become transparent overnight and are standing in front of a being that has no definite figure yet feels bigger than anything you've ever felt, you'd think you're dead too.
Let's start from the beginning, shall we? I was born the second child and first son of Dr and Mrs Rains. We lived in upstate New York. My family was full of successful people and as such I was expected to be successful too. I wasn't a genius by any means, far from it infact but I always got good at whatever I did if I tried hard enough. So I studied and got top marks and played sports and made my parents proud but something felt missing. I felt empty and desolate, like there was a hole in my chest that couldn't be filled. It was painful but not in a physical way. I felt like I was wasting my life.
But I went on with my life, feeling pain but not knowing what caused it. I became successful, a lawyer. And because I eventually got very good at whatever I put my mind too, I soon became one of the most successful lawyers in New York. But life was still boring. I began to feel despair and started withdrawing into myself, my face gradually morphing into one with an eternal look of indifference and rigidity. Then I started finding things that interested me. Fiction. All Fiction. The stories threw me into worlds that were full of wonder and mystery. Movies, anime, comics, manga, games, I absorbed them all and then my despair deepened. Why couldn't I have been born in a world such as these? Why was my existence so monotonous and linear? I envied them. The characters that had the right to call these worlds, home.
So I continued living, full of despair. I got married and had two children because my parents wanted me to give them grandchildren and while I never felt anything for my wife, my children were different. They shed a light on the darkness that was my life and I started smiling once more. I showered my children with the love my parents were so stingy with and I didn't try to mold them to my preferences. And they lived happily ever after huh? No we didn't. When I was fifty-seven and my son and daughter were twenty and seventeen respectively, tragedy struck. My children and my wife died in an airplane crash on their route back from a holiday in the Bahamas. I didn't go with them because I was finishing up a case. And I regretted that decision for the rest of my life.
And as suddenly as it came, happiness was ripped from me and I returned back to the void. I was angry and sad and my heart was in pain. Was I not destined for happiness? Was I meant to be this broken, accursed mistake? Was the world meant to be this dark? Was life meant to be this painful?
So three years after the death of my family, I followed in their footsteps. Diagnosis? Acute depression and heart failure. I was finally free or so I thought.
Now I'm here.
Infront of this deity.
Waiting for him to address me.
Waiting for him to decide my fate.