Of all the places I’ve gone, from the beaches of the outer banks to the Grand Canyon, perhaps the most fascinating place I’ve been was The Other Side. Not the one with the chicken, but the whole she-bang, the one that comes with death.
Before I get ahead of myself I think it’s at least somewhat important to say how I died, since it seems to sort of be a major plot point. As we all know the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills comes to us in the spring, and with it a board of politicians who try to look good by giving questions to the grade level that features knowledge well below what we learn the year we take it. While I could go on to say this fuels an endless cycle of under achieving metonymy we must focus on the question at hand. I had been a bright eyed freshman at the time, just about realizing just how soul crushing the public education system is when I’d made it to the assigned class room to proceed with a process that was about as much fun as smashing your own brains out with a brick.
Of course, at the time I didn’t know that I would quite literally have my head bashed by a blunt instrument. You see, upon this day, I had found out the hard way that I had type two, Juvenile Epilepsy. To give you the basics, I’m staring down at quadratic equations when the funniest thing happens. I have a seizure. I’m not sure if it was during, or after my body was doing a recreation of the exorcist, but in the end, I end up kicking the bucket.
Now before all those skeptics get all in a huff and the atheists claim it to be a hallucination, I should point out that there were no, alpha, beta, or theta waves in my brain during this time. For those who don’t know what it is that they do, Beta main function is cognitive thought, Alpha creativity, and Theta dreams in sleep. Now that the self-righteous Biddies have been dealt with, I have to say, Death is pretty fun. No, not dying, or even the thought of it, both are sad facts of the universe that have to be dealt with by each and every one of us in both the small and the big.
But being dead? It’s pretty sweet. The sensation is a euphoric one, combining the restfulness of a dreamless sleep, with the warmth of the sun on your face on a cool spring morning. Time becomes meaningless and physics as we know it are tossed out the window. Flying through the Aurora Borealis and being in a state of peace- of unparalleled Nirvana? No wonder people try to make their afterlife a good one which brings me to my next point.
Heaven is empty. I’m sure that by this point (if I haven’t been locked up in a mental institution for rambling on about this) that you’re either play the cynic and saying ‘of course there’s not, we’re all evil monsters’ or thinking I was in the wrong place, but trust me when I say that I was there. The comforting thing about is that no one was there because they were- are watching over their loved ones. When I reluctantly came back –a sensation like losing balance when you’re tipping your chair back- I had found that I not only accepted death, but I welcomed it.
Because of this, I’ve almost become disinterested with life and have no ambition because of it. It isn’t like I want to do suicide and speed up the process. It’d be selfish and basically spitting in God’s eye, and honestly, I feel like there’s something here on Earth that I need to do, but until I find that out I’m left here wondering- what is there for me to do?