The Death of Diane West

Diane West was about to die and no-one was going to care. She played a dangerous game but considered the risk worth the reward. In fact, in her sober moments, she wished she would.

She was well known in the small rural town. Everyone knew her. Everyone ignored her. With cause. If she wasn't asking for drugs, she was begging for money. Or maybe it was the other way around. Begging for drugs and asking for money. People had tried to help, but she wasn't willing.

The old men frowned and the old women shook their heads. "Bless her heart," they'd mutter. "That family? She never had a chance."

And maybe she didn't. Call it genetics. Call it fate. Hell, you could even say it was destiny. It didn't matter. The outcome was the same. She was a junkie with no way out of it.

Diane didn't give a fuck what they thought, even if they were right. Her only concern was the next fix. The next high. The next chance to forget this shitty existence and float away on serotonin waves for just a little while.

She's squatted down in the floor of the little single wide trailer, dirt and filth caked haphazardly everywhere. Not caring. She takes the crumpled up piece of foil with shaky fingers, fighting to control it, to not drop any.

Soon enough, the lighter is lit and the needle is in. She'd had trouble finding a vein that wasn't blown to hell but she'd managed. She always found a way to manage.

The first euphoric tingle slips into her blood, making it sing and harmonize with the universe. It catches in her breath, smoothing reality out into a warm fuzz that's finally bearable. Breathable. None of that crushing existential angst. None of the smothering pain she carried around every day. It wasn't a pain-killer. It was the absence of pain.

But... it wasn't as good as it use to be. What had once been glittering lights and silver mirrors was now dimmed and muted. So, she took more. And more. Until, finally, she took too much.

The world narrowed, tunneling down until it was just a pinprick. She was acutely aware of her lungs and how deflated they were, and she found she didn't give a shit. She didn't care to move them, and couldn't even if she tried. She heard a noise, like water rushing over rocks as her vision continued to narrow.

'Finally," she tells herself, surprising herself with the realization she'd been trying to kill herself for years and had finally succeeded.

She was as surprised as anyone when she saw the light. That was a Hollywood trope, a fairy tale people told themselves because they were afraid of the dark. The misfirings of synapses in a dying brain. But she'd be damned if she didn't see a light in the pinprick of vision she had left.

And it was getting brighter. And brighter. So bright it took up her entire world. She lifted a hand to cover her eyes it was so bright now, like the sun had come down to Mississippi and parked itself in her trailer.

The movement of her hand took her by surprise. She couldn't even breathe. How the hell had she lifted her hand? She holds it out, palm up, golden light showering down on it, glittering off her skin like expensive jewelry. It was then that she realized she was standing up and there was a body at her feet.

She looked down and saw herself. What she was. What she had been. "What the fuck is going on?" she asks herself, trying to work herself into a panic but it was almost like she was still drugged. The only emotion she could manage was a resigned peace. A peace she had never felt before. A peace that put the lie to the feeling heroin had given her. That made it seem so false and little.

She felt a tug, like a magnet was trying to lift her. She looked down at her body one last time. The pale, frail suit she had thought was her these last thirty-eight years. She felt no attachment to it any longer. Eager to let it go.

She looked directly into the light, aware that something so bright should blind her, but it didn't. It looked like a tunnel, a mouth opening up into a spinning vortex of golden light and love and she let go, let herself be lifted and absorbed into the cosmos.

It was infinitely wide and infinitely small. She felt herself, her true-self expand as she traversed this light tunnel into the unknown. There were beings in this tunnel, but she was traveling too fast to look at them. She was traveling so fast it felt super-luminal, and it was speeding up. It felt like it took aeons, and no time at all.

She found herself sitting on a bench in an open meadow filled with wildflowers and towering sentinels of trees. They were so tall it looked like they scraped the clouds as they floated over.

"Nice trees, huh?" she hears a voice next to her. "Personal favorite of mine."

She looks to her right, and sees a man that had died twenty years ago.

"Poppy?" she asks, shocked. "What is this place?" She notices that she didn't actually speak the words. She had thought it, and her grandpa had heard her. But that didn't seem strange to her at all. It was almost as if that was the way it was supposed to be. Perfect understanding and communication.

"Yeah, kiddo. It's me," he says as he looks around. "Think of this place as a... holding place." She still wants to freak out. To lose her shit, but she can't make herself do it. The feeling of peace and love was too strong. So strong that she got the sense that love was actually what the Universe was made of.

"Did I die?" she asks, already knowing the answer.

"For now," he tells her, taking an easy seat beside her. She looks at him more closely. It was the best version of him she'd ever seen. Her grandpa had been an alcoholic. She didn't have any many memories of him where he wasn't drunk. She'd never seen him look so... healthy.

"For now?" she asks him, confused.

"You gotta go back, kid. It's not your time yet," he tells her, staring out over the meadow at the beautiful flowers.

"Oh... Poppy?" she says, following his gaze.

"Yeah?"

She takes a deep breath, feeling like the very air itself was alive in her chest, and lets it out before she speaks. "There is no way in hell I'm going back." She said it matter of factly because she meant it. Her old life had nothing for her.

That made him laugh and he kicks back a little, reclining into the old wood bench. "I knew you'd say that. We hear that a lot," he tells her. "You still have to go back though. But don't worry. You'll be back and I'll be waiting for you. I promise," he says.

She wants to argue but holds her tongue. She didn't want the first thing she did in heaven to be arguing with her grandpa-but she wasn't going back.

"Poppy... I don't want to go back. I have nothing for me there. My life was so terrible. So... hard. And painful. I can't go back to it," she says, on the verge of pleading.

She points down, back towards her old life and says, "This isn't what I signed up for." She looks around at the beautiful landscape. The insane colors she'd never seen before. The breath-taking panorama laid out before her and says, "This is what I signed up for."

That makes him laugh again and he hugs her with one arm, pulling her closer. She melts into him, taking the opportunity to hug someone she'd never thought she'd see again.

"You've already agreed to go back. Let me show you something," he tells her. The next moment she's inside of a memory, or a future event, or maybe it was happening now. Time didn't make sense anymore. It didn't exist in this place.

It was Diane, before she'd became Diane West, choosing her life and the things that would happen to her. All the pain. All the suffering. She'd chosen it. So she could learn from it. So she could evolve with it. That Diane had known that no harm could every truly befall her. That no stain could be left on her soul. That this was a learning experience only.

She opened her eyes, finding herself on the bench again. She takes a deep breath again, pressing her palms flat against her thighs and says, "Well. Fuck."

"That's one word for it," Poppy says, big smile curling into his bearded cheeks.

"I gotta go back," she says, defeated. She'd seen it. She'd known, always known, that she'd die and be here and be sent back. She'd seen that she'd had a lot of life left to live. She'd seen that she had more to learn and to experience.

"Don't let it get you down, kid. I'll be waiting right here when you get back. I promise," he says, standing up and pulling her with him.

"I'll hold you to it, old man," she says, hugging him again, still reluctant to go, but knowing she had to. He didn't have to tell her to kick the drug habit. She already knew that part of her life was over. She was going back for more this time.