The Violin

I watch silently as my hood seemingly liquefies. It bends and contorts, steadily pushing back towards me. The windshield shatters almost instantly. Shards of glass explode into the cabin. No longer bound by gravity, they float freely. Time runs slow. A permeable silence oversets the entire scene. It is, in a word, peaceful.

Tick.

My watch breaks the silence. The secondhand advances and I, or what is left of me, am harshly flung forwards. As the airbag meets my head, the world goes dark. I have seen for the last time.

I am not scared, not anymore. Not like when I first noticed the bright red truck veering into my lane. Not like when I pointlessly rammed the steering wheel away. Now I am just sad. Empty. The fight is over, I know that. There is no reason to resist.

Instead, I relax. I soak in all I can. Every feeling, every thought. These would be my last moments of existence in the world. In everything.

Of course, I cannot breathe anymore. Time is too slow. But I imagine my lungs filling with air, imagine that wonderful feeling of a full breath. I miss it gravely.

My first coherent thought is of my mother. Susanne is her name. She has long, dark brown hair. She has beautiful green eyes. I love her, and soon I will forget her. Soon I will forget myself.

I feel for her. I feel as though I have betrayed her, that I have done something wrong. I was on my way to work when it happened. My job was nothing fancy, I had only gotten out of high school the year before. I resented it at the time, of course. I wished I had all the free time in the world to lay around and do nothing all day. Now I just wish I had time.

I think about religion. My parents raised me as a Christian. I had quickly abandoned that, though. I could never commit myself to blindly following a god I could not prove to exist. Beyond that, I could never make myself believe in an afterlife. It seemed too perfect, too human - too moral for the universe.

Now I just wish I could believe. It would make dying so much easier.

Tick.

A new feeling in my legs jerks me away from my thoughts. Is it pain? I can’t tell. The feeling quickly spreads up my whole body, numbing every piece it touches. I savor the moment, drinking in every feeling.

For a split second there is sound. A low humming fills the air around me. I don’t know what it is. It sounds like bending metal. Like death.

I pull my thoughts back, trying my best to ignore the inevitable. I can’t remember what I was thinking about, though. All that is left is a blank void where I know a memory should be. Briefly, almost imperceptibly, an image crosses my mind. It is of a woman. She has brown hair. She is sad.

 I don’t know who it is.

A sudden flash of light illuminates my brain, filling my entire being with a warm glow. It has color, lots of color, but color has lost all meaning to me. I know the old words I used to describe color. Red, green, blue, all of them portraying an entirely different thing. Not anymore. To me, it is all the same.

Slowly the glow leaves my brain. It drains out, leaving a bleak hole in existence as it fades. My thoughts lose all meaning. Peace fills my body, stretching from end to end. A deep, unending nothing fills my brain. The being that had been me was gone, merged now with everything and yet somehow nothing.

The nothingness is unlike anything else. It is inconceivable. Impossible. It isn’t dark, like when you close your eyes. It isn’t quiet. It simply isn’t anything. Darkness and silence require an understanding of light and sound. These things mean nothing to our universe. They are just energies and vibrations in an otherwise unliving void.

Tick.

Just as I thought I was gone a wonderful noise graces my entire consciousness. I know that it’s fake. A hallucination of a dying brain at most, but it is beautiful, nonetheless. I can’t tell what it is, but somehow it sounds of a violin.

Unthinking, I listen to that soft violin. It feels good, calm. It lifts me up, out of the darkness and into the unending sky of the universe. It carries me away from where I have always been, where I have always fought so hard to stay.

At first I was frightened. The darkness around me rapidly, yet almost unnoticeably morphs into shapes. They begin as simple objects. Lines and dots dance around my vision, peacefully flowing and rearranging into more complex shapes.

Tick.

The violin hastens, and as it does a pulse of beauty runs throughout the scene. The tempo is incredible, and it is now anything but quiet. It is everything.

Shapes quickly turn to fractals, and fractals into infinity. I see things I could never previously comprehend. The void I had entered before is no longer there. Instead, this is something new. Not an afterlife, of course. No, this is even more wonderful then that.

This place has no human ideas, no comprehensible reason to exist. This is everything, and yet nothing. The shapes interact now. They form structure. A third dimension arises quickly out of the chaos. Instead of shapes, they are now objects. Pieces of a piece of everything.

Tick.

The ever-accelerating violin turns to a crescendo. The beat pulses through the objects. It changes them, gives them character. I realize now that I am that beat, that song. I am those shapes, those colors. I am everything, and nothing.

All of it is connected. No two objects hold their structure for long. They warp in out of the plane of existence. They form entire worlds, only to crumble and become something else. The universe is incredible. A mathematical paradise of beautiful chaos. I have been here forever, I know that now. This is our universe.

Tick.

The objects move too quickly to watch now, yet somehow this makes them easier to see. Time begins to unravel. It flows backwards. The wreck is undone. My life is undone. The universe is undone. As it reaches the beginning so too does it reach the end. All of existence lay bare before me, and I understand it perfectly. It possesses a certain meaningless meaning, a purpose without purpose. There is no reason for any of it, and that is the perfect reason for all of it.

This is divinity. This is meaning. An entire fabric of intrinsic structure, of beauty. It was made for no purpose. In fact, it was never made at all. It simply is, and always has been. There is no creator, no meaning. Rather, in a wonderful, epic twist, there is no creation. There is only everything, and nothing.

Time has dissolved. It is simply another dimension, another forwards. No longer am I forced to move through it. Now, time moves through me. I can step through it. I can push it back. But I cannot change the universe. Instead I am the universe.

I am love, and I am hate.

I am the stars, and I am the planets.

I am time itself, and I am the void.

I am home at last.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.