Once upon a time, there lived this loser. When I say loser, I mean big, giant, caps lock button stuck L-O-S-E-R. The type of guy who wasn’t any good, who never made anything of himself. The type of guy who never called his mother (not even on her birthday), who didn’t cry when she died, who never wondered about his where his old man had wandered off to. He never went to church, and didn’t believe in anything or anyone. He had never even once in his life felt what love was like. He was apathy defined, if you were to believe what others had to say about him, which he seemed intent on doing. He never questioned anything but his alarm clock. He didn’t think, he didn’t act, and he didn’t care. To say that’s the way he liked it would be stretching the truth, since that would indicate that he actually liked anything at all.
His name was November, and I used to be him.
Once upon a time.
It all started when I was born. No, no, that’s not quite right. That would suggest that something actually happened when I was born. No, I think I’d have to say with some certainty that it all started when I died (or perhaps shortly before, but I think I’m getting ahead of myself).
I was standing there. I didn’t remember dying, but I knew with confidence that I was dead. I was standing on train platform, looking at a beast of a train, old-fashioned, iron, growling in an ominous timber. It had just stopped, but only one person got off.
The ticket collector was quite obviously a demon, tall (10 feet, plus his wicked horns), smoky orange skin, wide craggy mouth full of deadly sharp teeth. I cursed under my breath. Demon. I knew where I was headed.
The ticket collector stood dutifully by the car entrance closest to me. He picked a piece of lint off his blue coat and waited.
I stood.
The ticket collector checked his watch, hummed a little tune.
I looked around.
The ticket collector coughed a little.
I watched him check his watch again before I approached. “Um-”
“Good afternoon, sir,” he said in a rumbling baritone wrapped in nightshade. “Thank you for choosing us. Ticket please.” He held out his hand.
I looked around, patted down my pockets. I pulled out $3.67, a button, half a bag of airline peanuts, and a receipt for a bottle of aspirin from the airport gift shop.
The ticket collector watched me and frowned. “A wise guy, huh?” He grabbed me by the shoulder.
“Wha, no I-!” But before I could finish my thought, he had shoved a claw down my throat. I flailed at him, fighting against the hand pushing down the back of my throat. I wanted to gag, but couldn’t seem to figure out how.
He pulled his arm back, a puzzled look on his face. He opened his clenched fist and we both looked at the small metal disk on his palm. It was a dungy copper, almost the color of old blood, with a faint outline of a heart inside of which was a circle, about the size of a nickel. It had a hole at the top, like a dog tag or ornament. I looked at it and then looked at him. He stared at it intently.
“Um,” he said, surprise in his voice.
In unison, we leaned in. We stared for a while longer. “Excuse me,” I finally ventured, being very careful to be more polite than usual.
“Huh?” he grunted, carefully turning the trinket over. It was exactly the same on the other side.
“What…What are we looking at?”
He hesitated. “Well…it’s supposed to be your heart…but…I’ve never seen one like this before.”
I looked up at him. “Hmm,” was all I could think to answer him with.
“Hmm,” he agreed.
We stood there.
Suddenly, the whistle blew, shocking us out of our stupor. He shrugged. “I suppose it’ll all work out in the wash.” He straightened, and with some bravado took my tiny coin heart and dropped into the slotted box on his belt. “All aboard!” he called, and the train spewed steam and bellowed. He opened the door to his left for me.
I looked at him, and then the dark gaping doorway.
“All aboard, sir,” he reminded me.
I nodded. “Have a good one,” I said on my way past.
And then I lost all sensation.

You’ve never felt nothing.
You might want to argue, but I can tell you that you’ve never had absolutely no sensation at all. Even unconscious, some part of you is constantly aware of sights, and sounds and feelings, temperature, humidity. If nothing else, your body feels it: the beating of your own heart, the steady pace of your own breath in your lungs, the blood in your veins, the feeling of your turkey sub digesting, the push and pull of your kidneys hard at work.
I don’t think terrifying is a strong enough word for it.
Nothing made sense. I’ve read (since, definitely not heading into this) that a man is his mind, that all we are our own consciousness. Our mind and nothing else defines us, it is our essence. All we need to continue to survive is our thoughts.
Bull. Shit.
A mind’s all well and good and everything, and we definitely don’t exist without one.