I’m feeling hungry, so I go to my kitchen and turn on the stove. I inadvertently have the handle of the frying pan sitting above the flame and when I go to pick up the pan my entire hand melts off in an instant.
Damnit. I only had two of those and now I’m down to one. That was my dominant hand too.
But you have to just keep moving forward when these things happen. I pull the pan back to the correct position with a tea towel to let the handle cool off and open the fridge to pull out some ingredients. As I turn around I catch a glimpse of the sunrise through the window, and in spite of the burning light I fixate on it for a few moments in awe of its beauty. Unfortunately those few moments were sufficient to partially blind me in both eyes and now everything around me has a kind of washed-out, ghostly appearance to it and there’s less detail. Good thing I didn’t stare any longer or I’d have to develop echolocation to navigate around my house or something.
I pull out my phone and message my friend about these unfortunate occurrences, framing it in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way but there was something about the way I phrased it that rubbed her the wrong way and now she’s saying she never wants to speak to me again and has blocked me. Damn, she’s gone forever.
Perhaps it is time to pick a less risky activity.
I turn on the TV and start flicking through shows I could watch on Netflix. Paralysed by choice I’m struggling to pick a show. By the time I do pick one, I realise my phone has been aggressively vibrating. I check it and realise that ten years have passed since I started looking for a show to watch. Ten years gone for the sake of picking a Netflix show and I wasn’t even that keen on the show that I ended up picking. Many of the notifications on my phone are from my bank informing me of unpaid debts which have compounded over the last decade to be in the millions.
I open my front door to see what the world looks like now after 10 years and a tower of mail, eviction notices, bills, and so on collapse on top of me and crush me.
Now I stand in an infinite black void. I look down and see that I’ve got my right hand back, but I’m evidently dead so it’s not of much use to me anymore.
Hang on I think, did I leave the stove on?
Just as I recognise the absurdity of that thought, a cloaked figure appears before me.
‘Welcome to death!’ he says. ‘This is going to be the location for the rest of your… conscious experience (I can’t say rest of your life because you’re not alive anymore). I won’t sugar coat it, it’s pretty bland but you get used to it.’
‘Will it just be this black void the whole time?’ I ask.
‘Yeah’ he responds.
‘Will I come across other people?’
‘No. I’m just dropping by now as a once-off courtesy’.
‘Okay’ I respond, feeling a little deflated. I know this question is a big one but I have to ask it: ‘Did I just live my entire life wrong?’
‘Umm…’ The cloaked figure ponders the question for a bit. ‘I’m not really an expert on life. I know a LOT about death. Like, a lot.’
The figure must have detected dejection in my expression, and now interrupts the silence with ‘But look, by the time most people wind up here, they’ve got plenty of regrets. Nobody gets it all right. You’re born, and then you go through life making the choices that you think are the best given the information you have at the time, and you don’t always have all the information to make the right choices. Do yourself a favour and forgive yourself for any failings on your part, you’re only human after all’.
‘Yeah, fair enough’ I respond.
‘Any other questions you had for me?’ asks the cloaked figure.
‘Yeah one more thing, is there somewhere for me to sit?’
‘You can sit on the ground’
I look at the ground, a hard polished surface, and respond ‘Got it.’
‘Alright, well it was nice meeting you, and yeah, enjoy.’ The cloaked figure vanishes, leaving me alone in the blackness.
I don’t particularly feel like sitting at the moment and am not in the mood for internalising what’s just happened to me, so for now I pick an arbitrary direction, and start walking.