And I shall be useful when I lie down finally

Being dead is like being unpopular at school, standing on the edge of a group, waiting for one person, just one, to acknowledge your presence but they never do. 

They just act like you are not even there. But you are. They just can’t see you, or hear you, or feel you. And that sucks.

She didn’t really want to die, she just wanted peace. 

This must be hell. Trapped in the house she so wished to escape, trapped in the same dynamic with her family, together in space but worlds apart. 

It’s funny, when you die, the urge to kill yourself remains.

One thing they don’t tell you is how loud the living are! There’s no point putting your hands over your ears because your ears don’t work anymore. Everything is frequency. You can’t make out their words anymore, it’s just vibrations that ripple through space and time. It happens when they sleep too, it’s not as loud but still, it makes it impossible to rest. Emotions are flying around and bouncing off each other. It was so irritating, and impossible to shelter yourself from. 

Bad vibes, good vibes, they use to say. That’s actually all there is.

What we do in life will echo in eternity. It’s true both literally and metaphysically. 

She had decided to leave her life but she carried her sadness and alienation with her. It only heightened when she left her body. 

It happened on a dull winter day, she stepped into the pool, she was so numb from the valium she barely felt the cold. She remembers the pull of her clothes like a weighted blanket, the delicate embrace of the water as she drifted out of consciousness. 

Then she jolted back into it. And she saw it all happen, the aftermath. 

The dog frantically barking at her floating remains, the screams of her mother who jumped in fully dressed to get her out of the water. Her whole body was shrouded in a thin veil of mist from the contrast of temperature as she tried, in vain, to revive her lifeless daughter.

Sure that made her feel pretty bad, to see the hurt she caused, but she felt distant from it too.

More than anything she felt uncomfortable. She didn’t belong there anymore. Everything is the same, yet everything is different. She thought she would ascend or disappear, but none of that happened.

She tried to leave too, but she couldn’t. 

Fun fact: Ghosts are forever bound to where they lived, or maybe its where they died? Hard to tell because this is where she did both. 

But she spent some time imagining people dying at sea dwelling at the bottom amongst the fishes, in a world so utterly different than the one they knew. It must be more quiet down there.

If only she had known that she would have thrown herself in the ocean instead of the backyard swimming pool.

They other funny thing is how precise the limits of her territory are.

A couple of years prior to DD day, as she called in in her mind, Disappointing Death Day, well a couple of years before that unfortunate day, the neighbour kicked up a storm about the apple tree that grew at the end of the garden. 

He said his mother had planted it in their garden the day his brother died and that it was his tree. His brother passed away before he was born and he didn’t seem to care about the tree one way or another for quite a few years. 

The apples were inedible. The super tiny and super sour kind. But anyway, he got all mad about it one day and got some solicitor to draft a new map of the gardens and scooped up the part of theirs where ’his’ tree was growing.

Her parents didn’t fight it because it really didn’t change anything.

Or so she thought.

She cannot go past that damn apple tree. It’s like theres a wall circling the property, and that wall exist just to stop from her going anywhere else.

Turns out what’s on paper affects how far the dead are allowed to dwell.

And dwell she did, that’s really all she could do.

She dwelled in the house, she dwelled in the garden, she dwelled by the cursed pool.

The water sat so still in the evening light. A perfect rectangle of turquoise. No one used it much anymore, she kinda ruined that for everyone.

So she played her suicide over and over again.

She stepped into the deep end without disturbing the water and let herself slide down to the bottom.

Fun fact number 2: Gravity works on ghosts as well. It’s not the same as for the living with their heavy bodies for sure, but even when you’re dead, the centre of the earth still wanna pull you close.

There she stood, still as the water, not drowning, not swimming, not any more at peace than she was on dry land.

She tried different ways to kill herself some more. But none of them worked.

The slipknot you slip right though, right through your translucent wrists the blade goes.

Through the wall the head goes. Through not against, alas, alas and alas again!

What does it really mean to die? She just went from one plane of existence to another.

And they both suck. At least the first time, she still had her hopes that it would stop. Now she knows it doesn’t.

What she really wants is to not be. How does one do that?

When you are dead it feels like everything is sped up. Times moves a little faster when you have an eternity, which incidentally makes everything less focused, less important. It’s the motion blur you get when your camera isn’t set right.

Everything is boring or flat right annoying.

All that’s left to perceive is the immobile shell of things beyond the perfunctory motions of an endless wave of happenings.

Chloe sits on a chair at the kitchen table. She shares the table with a tall glass of water. She stares at it. Objects are easier to engage with because they do not move, they are not constantly bustling.

Yet there’s something unbearably annoying about the stillness of the glass and its content. The water is trapped in a vertical position. Water doesn’t want to stand up, water wants to flow and disperse.

The glass, invisible prison, makes it impossible for the water to do so and it makes her furious. 

She can feel her whole self buzzing as loudly as a living being. 

The tension between her and the glass is vibrating the air. It becomes tangible. The glass starts to shake, imperceptibly at first but then it starts rocking more and more until it tilts completely, the water rushing to freedom as the glass rolls off the table and smashes into a hundred pieces on the floor.

A feeling of peace comes over her.

Chloe smiles for she now knows what to do.

She decided to go on one last tour of the house to say goodbye.

Goodbye to the attic and the 3 cardboard boxes that contained all of the remaining of her worldly possessions.

Goodbye parents bedroom with its array of confusing and frightening sounds of love, and hate, and the silence of indifference that came after.

Goodbye to the room her dreams and expectations grew and died in.

The tooth fairy and the old man from the North Pole who once a year brightened the winter days by bestowing an avalanche of present upon her.

So there died the idea that life was gonna get better when she became independent and free, and finally got the ever coveted breasts she envied her mother for so long.

Prince Charming and happily ever after.

Her younger brother moved in her room a little while ago, can only hope he doesn’t turn up as bad as some of the boys she’d met whilst she still had a heart to break and a body to bruise.

The kitchen then, where she once was in charge of cooking a whole chicken and lamely dropped it just as whole on the floor as she got it out of the oven. Classic chronic clumsiness, classic subsequent mockery.

Goodbye to the bathroom where she attempted and failed her first meeting with the reaper.

Goodbye to the garden finally, where she spent endless hours writing stories she never bothered to give an ending to.

She had her ending now, she thought. She never felt a sense of certainty so absolutely absolute.

She floated to her favourite tree and lied down amongst the wild flowers and for the first time ever realised that she was connected to everything. 

She fully accepted what is. The good, the painful, the boring. She felt like her whole life was flowing through and out of her. Her individuality merging with all that is and ever was.

When it comes to it feel less like a goodbye than a homecoming.

She was at peace, finally.