Part One
I died so fast that I never saw it coming. There is no way that I could have avoided the truck as it closed in on me. By the time that I had heard the belching drone of the trucks’ engine and its screaming tires it was too late. The driver managed to mount the curb and in an instant I was crunched against the cinderblock wall. I imagine that I was flattened like a pancake.
I had been riding my bike to my best friend Amy’s house to help her out with homework, though more than likely we were going to watch Twilight again. I know what you’re thinking. The books stunk a whole lot but in my opinion the movie was way more interesting.
The pain was excruciating for the first two seconds that it lasted and then I felt a cold numbness wash over my entire body. It was like a fog had swept over my mind. Everything was nothing. My senses shut down all at once and I was clueless as to what would happen next.
I longed for my eyes to peel open and find that I was lying in a hospital bed with a man in a white coat peering down at me and my parents who stood beside him, holding one another. I would read the anguish in their faces and the stress resting on their slumped shoulders. Their eyes would meet mine and light up. My mom would burst into hysterics and my dad would rush forward to hold me.
“Oh Samantha! Baby, we missed you so much!”
I imagined I would heal and get better with time, maybe with a scar or limp to remind me of how lucky I was to be alive. Too often I would wake up in the dead of night, sweating after being chased in my dreams by a barreling truck or something sinister like that.
That never happened.
The haziness cleared before me. I could see my physical body that was plastered and lifeless as I drifted slowly up into the sky. I saw the red and blue lights flashing around the overturned truck that had just killed me.
The thought of ‘my body’ being down there was a difficult thing to accept. It was more like a shell or cocoon to me. I had been reduced to an immaterial form, like a wisp or conscious energy.
As I drifted higher into the sky the cars became specks to me, followed by my school and the little town that was all I had ever known for the brief 16 years of my life on Earth. The life I had known was receding from me and there was nothing I could do to go back. The thought of my parents and little brothers crying and suffering made me wish I could comfort them. I wished that I could go back down if only for a few minutes to tell them how much I loved them. I should have said it more often. I could have been nicer to them I guess. I settled on screaming into my own drifting consciousness
(I love you all so much!)
and hoped that my love would reach them somehow. I’d like to think that they knew how much they meant to me. Somehow I knew that I would never see them again.
Part Two
It was not long before I had left Earth behind me. I drifted further towards the darkest reaches of space. How I was still able to process what I was seeing was a mystery to me. I had left Earth forever and all I could do was try to relax as I hoped to make sense of what I encountered.
I saw Jupiter from a distance, suspended against a plethora of stars that surrounded me from every direction. The staggering endlessness of space enveloped me and freaked me out. As I drifted I wondered how far I would be taken or what awaited me at the end of the voyage.
It did not take long before I had lost track of where I was. Stars that had looked like specks of light got so close that I eventually zoomed past them and their orbiting bodies. With all that I flew past it was hard to keep track of what there was to witness, much less make sense of it in the instant that I had to process it.
I saw planets of various sizes and colors. Occasionally I saw one buried beneath a horde of cold ships darting every which way. One ship came so close to me that I thought we might end up colliding with one another. Instead it stopped so close I could have reached out and touched it, if I still had my hands to do so. I caught a glimpse of its haphazard, blinking bright flashes of light and what looked like a spray of heavy red smoke escape from the body of the ship. No sooner had I seen it than it was gone, all the while I showed no signs of slowing down.
The supernovas were at once ferocious and beautiful as their destructive force swept across nearby bodies and obliterated them in an instant. Even through the comets and gas clouds I managed to see what at first seemed to be a fleet of ships. When I drew nearer I realized that it was a giant horde of interstellar life forms cuddled up against their queen. She spoke to them in clicks as they scrambled across her body and clung wherever they could.
I sped faster by the minute. The stars thinned away into thin streaks, leaving a trail behind them that told me I was traveling at light speed or whatever it is they call it on that old show my Dad watched all the time.
Without warning I came across a wasteland. It looked like a billion bombs had gone off and reduced all life to debris. The bodies of once magnificent and horrifying creatures were sprayed out in every direction. For a millisecond I thought I’d seen a massive body feasting on the garbage. I wanted to believe that it was way too massive to be living and that there was no way something so vile could exist.
It was a death-eater.
It seemed like a long time had passed before I left this sector of death behind me. I found myself streaking through a barren part of space that lit up all of a sudden with a brilliant array of colors that changed as I was hurled deeper through it. Here there were no planets or stars or bodies of gas to behold, just a rainbow of space drawn on for so long.
The colors gave way to a rich and untainted white. This was it, the end of the line. Somehow I knew that this was the core of the entire universe where all life spawned from. Something ahead of me was lighting this space. I had no idea how long it took me to get from Ceres, California to the core of the universe. I streaked through the lush white tapestry for such a long time. When I reached the end
(the beginning)
I came to a sudden halt.
Part Three
How do I begin to describe it with mere words? How do I begin to translate the true nature of life?
The light that emanated from it was blinding. It was a light so pure and infectious that it washed over me in unfiltered calm. I quickly realized that I was not the only wisp there surrounding it. We had all been brought to it from every part of the universe; brought back to a God, a mother, the singular source of it all.
We were right where we belonged.
I moved closer to it by my own free will. The light was like an infinite glorious beacon. It called out to me without words, tempting me to bathe in it, to join with it again, just as I had so many times before. Only then as I drew closer did I realize what it was made of.
It is made up of all of us.
The wisps around me darted forward without any hesitation to join the others, connecting with them as though they were the missing pieces of this eternally expanding puzzle.
I moved forward. There was no way that I could help it even if I wanted to. The light penetrated my being. I found my place on the outer layer and I too became one and the same. My temporary identity was stripped away in a flash as I dissolved and was drawn further into it.
But let me tell you one last thing before I go for good. At the center of the source I found the answers to every question imaginable. When you join me you will know them too. Only when we are one will we ever be free.
There is no beginning and there is no end.
FLAVIO HUITRON 