Last breath

They speak the truth. When death brushes against you, it does not settle for a polite farewell. It tears you from yourself, hurls you into a labyrinth of memories, where you are both the architect and the prisoner. This is no film played out on the reassuring screen of distant recollection, no story tamed by habit. No. It is a tidal wave. Every moment resurfaces, not as an image, but in its full weight, its raw flesh, its bite.

And first come the golden flashes. Those luminous instants that embrace you, that still keep you warm, despite the abyss yawning beneath your feet. They do not merely pass before your eyes; they wrap around you, hold you tight. I did not remember my graduation—I felt it. Not just the image of myself in that ridiculous gown, but the raw euphoria, the lightness of the moment before the unknown. My first kiss was not a memory but a fever, a burning imprint my lips had never forgotten. My daughter’s birth was not an event of the past but a tremor engraved into my skin. Those moments clung to me, and I clung back—desperately—or perhaps it was they who refused to let me go.

Then, the shadows stretch long. The vertigo sets in. A chaos without syntax, a grammar of flashes and echoes. Joy, sorrow, desire, shame, pride—they do not follow one another; they collide, pile upon each other, choking on the same breath. You do not watch your life pass by—you live it again, raw and exposed, without the filter of time, without the indulgence of distance. Some moments freeze, still and relentless, demanding your attention. The ones that wound. You recognize them instantly.

But worse still are the memories that do not merely wound—they haunt, they infest. The ones that burrow under your fingernails and refuse to let go. The irrevocable shames. The losses too vast. The fears never conquered. They return with cruel fidelity, the same force, the same pain, as though time had never learned to tame them. The precise moment when you should have spoken but kept silent. The moment when you should have left but chose to stay. The moment when you hurt someone without even meaning to.

You long to reach out, to rewrite the scene, to warn the child you once were, the man you became.

But no. The past is a cast shadow—untouchable.

I remembered my sins. The very ones that stole my sleep, that buried the poison of self-contempt deep within my flesh. My betrayals. The ones that still gnaw at me, that return insatiable, scraping at the wound to ensure it never fully closes.

I felt every blow I had ever received—each and every one. But none weighed as heavy as the ones I had delivered. A strange sensation: as if, in the moment, striking had emptied me, drained the rage from my body, only for each blow to return, carved deeper in my soul than in the flesh of another. It was not the pain that endured, but the stain of having inflicted it.

And that was the moment time chose to stretch, slow and merciless. The moment I understood—too late—that shame burns hotter than anger, that it consumes from within. A living flame that devoured me whole. The first ember of hell? Perhaps. But it felt awfully similar to guilt.

I see myself hunched over that body, my fists raining down again and again on a face already crushed with blood. A man who had insulted my honor. Mine? My partner’s, then? Both, perhaps? I no longer know. In the end, did it even matter?

And then, the pain was gone.

It left only sound—louder, more piercing than anything else. The screams, the cries, the desperate voices. Those who tried to pull me away, to drag me back from my victim, to restore some semblance of reason.

I heard it all. Every word, every whisper, every breath stolen by horror. But it was not their voices that spoke the loudest.

It was the blood.

His blood, warm and thick, seeping into my skin, invading my pores, as if trying to possess me. It pulsed against my palms, a silent message, a strangled cry. It carried his despair, his agony, his sorrow.

And then, there was his breath.

His last.

But it did not leave him at once. It clung to his ribs, lodged deep within his chest, as if refusing to surrender. It fought for him, sought refuge inside his broken body, curled up like a newborn in a cradle.

But in the end, it let go.

Under my assault. Under my rage. Under my blind, senseless blows.

And then, nothing.

My fury drained away, collapsing onto his lifeless form. Emptied, gutted, it abandoned me too—perhaps clearer-eyed than I was in that moment.

Then came the fear.

A vicious fear, ravenous, curling deep within my stomach, coiling around my ribs like a starving beast. It took hold of me, body and soul. My heart, already frantic, clenched so tight it sent a sharp pain shooting through my chest.

And then, the sound.

Distant at first, then rising, swallowing everything.

Sirens.

They climbed into the night, tolling like a funeral bell, dragging me back into the present.

Terror moved me before thought could.

I leaped onto my motorcycle. Turned the key. And as the rain lashed against the city like a punishment, I twisted the throttle.

Leaving the grotesque scene behind.

Trying to put distance between him and me. Between them and me. Between myself and what I had become.

But distance was never enough.

Anger, fear, frustration—all of it surged forward, seeking escape, demanding release. It poured out as tears, mixing with the rain that struck my face, washing nothing away.

And then—the curve in the road.

A suspended instant.

The rain streaked like silver threads, the city spun and twisted.

And I was still.

Everything stopped.

It’s strange. I had never really thought about this moment. I had always believed we vanished like a candle blown out, that darkness swallowed us without ceremony. Poof. Gone. Curtain closed.

But no.

There is one last act, and it is the cruelest of all: the one where you realize that nothing ever truly fades.

And so here I stand, beneath the rain that passes through me, staring at my own body sprawled across the asphalt.

Frozen.

A spectator to my own end.

And now?

After life… what comes next?