On the night I died, I had decided to meet a friend for drinks. My girlfriend, Cheryl, was in her dorm room, working on a paper that was due the next day. I had wanted to break things off, had been thinking about it for a while, but how do you say “I don’t want to be your boyfriend anymore” over the phone? You can’t. So, I wanted to wait and tell her in person. It was the only gentlemanly thing I could do. Before I met my friends for drinks, I decided to trek over to her building in West Hall and speak to her. It wasn’t pleasant, for either of us, but it was necessary, I thought. Once our conversation had ended, I desperately needed drinks, so I made my way to the restaurant. Jimmy’s Pizza Bar wasn’t far from campus--I only had to walk a few blocks, and I could easily catch a cab back to my apartment, even at that late hour.
I remember, as I walked, there was a ceaseless buzz in my pocket. Within a few minutes, I had 27 messages--missed calls, text messages, Facebook assaults, Twitter hashtags. Ah, life in the time of social media.
I had given Cheryl more credit for maturity than she deserved, evidently. After just a few minutes, that little bird icon on my phone, notifying me that I was tagged yet again in a meaningless tweet, within only a few seconds, stirred a flurry of disgust and anger inside me. It made me blind and deaf to the world around me. I think that’s why I didn’t notice the sound of footsteps echoing off Eastman Library or why I failed to turn around just as I came to the corner of Rivers and Payne, the only street corner on the entire block where the streetlight had blown out. I think that’s why I didn’t notice someone on my back, slipping inside me, burgling my life, letting me drop, face down, onto the sidewalk.
Even now, as I stand over the spot where I died, I can make out the faint trail of blood from where I rolled. I remember a lot of blackness. The black still of the night. The blood shimmering black in the moonlight. The blackness of the person stabbing me more in the chest. The black of the heel that sharpened the leg of my murderer. The blackness of the face, a fully realized shadow before me. I know it's my imagination toying with me, but I swear I could make out the contours of a smile within the shadowed face.
I was taught to believe that, at the moment of death, there was a blindingly warm embrace, bathed in white light, that would carry me into the afterlife. I found that to be false in a most significant moment. The moment my vessel gave up the ghost, it was like I had blinked. I was standing over myself, cold and alone. No echoing footsteps. No shadowed faces or heels. No explanation. What remains? Simply assumptions--whispers of doubt and certainty, glimmers of sureness and darkness--all quivering in my stomach like a ceaseless hunger for beer and pizza and a night with friends which will never be satiated. What remains, outside my lifeless body, standing inside my spirit, is a wonder: Who did this, and why? I know the answer is out there, and perhaps I already know. Is it the reason that warm light and embrace didn’t find me? I don’t think I want to accept the assumption as truth.
[Ahem.]
So . . . how did you wind up here?