Counterintuitive
There’s a lot to be said for being dead. A lot of fun to be had, moving keys or that important document just when someone is rushing to a meeting. Contrary to popular opinion, there’s nothing holding you to any particular place once you’ve left your body, only sentimentality, and I never was the sentimental type.
I’ll admit to having been in shock for a fair few years after the accident. We all were. It would be easy to explain it away as being Joe’s fault. Young, dumb and full of cum, the papers initially thought he’d been driving too fast to impress the girlies. Truth was, it was bad luck. The police investigation brought out the truth and I was glad - we all would have hated for anyone to think that he was to blame. He’d been just under the speed limit driving down a back road when a sheep, of all things, suddenly ran out in front of us. He swerved to avoid it and went straight into a tree. All four of us, Joe, Beth, Ryan and I, gone in an instant.
I’d like to say that we all remained friends, stuck together through thick and thin, but Beth wanted to stay with her parents. I told her she was nuts, that she would only hurt herself by watching their pain and grief when there was nothing she could do to help them, but she thought they’d sense her presence and be comforted by it. I don’t know if she was right - I didn’t stick around to watch. There was something darkly voyeuristic about witnessing private displays of grief. It seemed almost sick to torture myself by seeing how much everyone missed us, not when I didn’t have to, and I must admit that being free of my body seemed to have freed me of a lot of emotional ties as well. It’s not that I didn’t care about my parents, it just seemed pointless hanging around. Besides, they were staunch atheists, psychic as a brick. Whisper in their ears and they thought it was a mosquito. Move the photos on the fridge and they didn’t question it. Either they didn’t notice or they assumed the other one had done it.
Turns out Joe and Ryan agreed with me that it was much more important to enjoy life now we were dead. We could be anywhere in the world if we only thought about it and if we wanted to go clubbing 24/7, we could. And we did. We really did. It took a few years before the novelty wore off - time seemed to pass differently once we had eternity to play with. But when dancing on the ceiling (because we could) lost its attraction, Ryan and Joe were great at coming up with other ways to entertain ourselves. It took a bit of work to figure out how to move objects with telekinetic energy, but once we’d mastered it, the fun we had. I never grew tired of watching couples argue over who put the remote control in the wardrobe.
But Ryan did. One day he told Joe and me that he’d had enough. There was a door. We all knew about it. It didn’t matter where we went, that door would be there, in the corner of the bar, in the middle of the park, the same door, slightly ajar, a gentle light creeping through the crack. We’d stayed away from it. No one had ever told us, but we knew that if we went through it, that would be it. Game over. And here was Ryan telling us he was going to go through it. No amount of begging or pleading would dissuade him. He’d had enough of this plane and he wanted to see what was waiting beyond the door. When he opened it, all I could see was a blinding light and I could barely make out his wave and he stepped through and was gone, the door closing behind it. We never saw him again.
That was enough to scare Joe and me off for years. We threw ourselves into the party lifestyle like there was no tomorrow, wanting to make the most of what existence we did have. Until Joe told me he felt the same, that he’d been thinking a lot about what Ryan had said and it made sense. There had to be more than this and even if there wasn’t, he was tired. There was no rest for the dead and he desperately wanted rest.
Saying goodbye to Joe was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It didn’t make any sense to me. Going through the door was suicide as far as I was concerned and how could he even think about that?
But wherever I went, there it was. Haunting me. Taunting me. A reminder that once I had friends and now I was alone, even in the middle of a crowd, a crowd that had no idea I was among them. Partying just wasn’t the same without Joe and Ryan to make fun of the outfits and music. Wanting to end it all made no sense when there was so much to live for, but that was the point. I wasn’t alive. I hadn’t been for decades. It might go against everything I believed, but I was beginning to think that perhaps, for a dead person, the end was exactly what I should want.
Eternity is boring when you have no one to share it with. No doubt there were millions of stray spirits just like me still wandering the earth, but I’d only ever been able to see the people I’d died with, like some macabre members only club. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a conversation with anyone except the little voice in my head and that voice was telling me that I’d been clinging to life for too long. I’d had my time and then some.
I don’t know what it was that gave me the courage in that moment to go to the door and push it open, but I knew that if I didn’t do it while I had the nerve, I might be trapped by my own insecurities for centuries yet. I'd been standing in front of the door for what seemed like a lifetime but finally, I took a deep breath, turned the handle and let the light envelope me.