Living On

I died today. It took me a really long time to figure out what happened.

I was about to cross the street. My streetlight had just turned white. I heard a whizzing, any closer and it would have stepped on my feet. A little dazed, i watched as the car rushed away.

I died.

You would not think i had. I did not think i had. I do not think i did. But i did die.

I did not watch myself from above, floating as some sort of unearthly form, ready to depart to heaven after i had had my fill of watching crowds forming around me, until someone had the sense to call 911, ambulances wailing with their flashy lights, the smell of decay and death feeling the air, weak still, but it would get stronger when they put me in my grave many days later. I did not watch, floating as blood dried and caked on my side, did not taste the blood in my mouth, little pieces of broken teeth as well.

No, i was somewhere much worse. Much better. I was in my own head. As my heart shuddered and lurched to a halt, unlike the car that had careened from side to side, hazily, groggily, the driver realizing what he had done, his flight reflex taking over, unlike that car, my heart just put the brakes on full, and screeched to a halt. Blood stopped flowing to my body, my lungs stopped breathing oxygen. My body shut down. I was inside.

Inside my head.

In the few seconds before my head would realize that it blood had stopped pumping, before it would be deprived of oxygen, blacken out of existence with a poof like a candle blown out, before all of that would happen, the over-excited neurons in my head constructed a fantasy. I did not see the Divine, i did not see my life flashing before my eyes. I saw how narrowly i had missed the car, and how i carried on with my life.

I saw my many triumphs and failures, the laughs and losses i had shared with friends. I saw friends moving away, new ones coming into my life, i saw myself turn twenty five, then twenty six, twenty seven, twenty eight, pages being flipped one after the other on the volume of my life. I lived through all of those experiences for the first time, in real time.

But that is really the caveat, isn’t it. Real time does not exist. Time is not sequential, in those ten seconds that my brain stopped getting newly oxygenated blood, it constructed decades of a life, that it lived through, that i lived through. Time is linear, it exists all in one plane. It is nothing, it does not exist, but as a feeble attempt on the part of humans to make sense of our world, as a before, and an after. If it were all together, all at the same time, for lack of a better word, how would we process it? In those ten seconds, i lived decades of life, and died at the hearty age of seventy three, having hugged my granddaughter tightly, love blossoming in my feebly pumping heart, the same heart that had stopped, and that would stop in my brain’s estimation, that night as i slept, and the granddaughter of the first dog i had had.

I died today. I lived today, i died.