That One Moment

A collection of memories and moments, bound by one life to tell…

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I.

That one moment, when you finally realise what life is all about, is when it’s too late to go back and change anything, because you can no longer affect the world around you. The second that I went beyond the veil that separates life so casually from death, was the instant I saw, with perfect clarity, everything.

There is nothing to be feared about death, and dying is just the body’s reminder that you were born into this world in pain, you lived your life in pain, and you end it in pain. It seems that pain is one of the few, true constants in this universe. That is, until you die. Once that happens, nothing is constant except the fact that you remain dead.

Feeling, emotion… all this is left behind with the body, because all they are are tiny little chemical imbalances in the blood and the brain – tiny impulses of nerve activity. You might also think that you lose all five of your senses… this is untrue, because I can quite easily see everything around me.

I can feel the cool breeze of the other souls jostling around for position, trying to gaze through that veil. The icy touch as one spirit barges its way through me… the sensation my senses recall back to me, remind me of my final moments, of the steel blade burrowing its way deep through my chest.

Blood that no longer flows had stained the purity of that knife, forever tarnishing both it, and the person who wielded it; blood that congeals in a red pool that spreads out from my fallen body like the yolk from a broken egg. Blood that once gave me strength and life, now streams away from me, into the open gutter, flowing into the thin grate outside my home.