A smile tasting death

And so I died.

Of course, it hurt, the blazing sensation piercing my heart made me remember all the rejections I’ve experienced, all heartaches and traumas struck me at the same time.

I think this is the famous moment when you see your life in front of your eyes, regret all you’ve refused to do, and smile because your life, despite all that, was good.

Well, I just died, without any last time realization, I just… died.

“So… this is it? It was less frightening than I thought, maybe a little more despair, doom, and agony, you know, the usual seasoning.”

The dark, cold, and empty numbness in which my soul was submerged disappeared so a blinding glow could manifest and burn the skin I thought I’d lost.

“Ok, ok, ookay, arrghhh!”

The so sought affliction ran through my convulsing body while I screamed in response to the white-iron melting pain.

Maybe that was my fate, I was in hell and would relive that moment for the rest of eternity.

I got scared, terrified, angry because I asked for it. But, besides that, nay, above that, I became sad, excruciatingly heartbroken, with a lonely tear on my left eye, because I thought I’d have to endure it…

It makes me timid to say that, but I was afraid I’d have to endure it alone.

“If I just had someone…”

“What d’you mean? I’m here for you. And I love you. Crazily, madly, desperately, frantically, hysterically, I love you!”

My eyelids exposed my dry eyeballs, my pupils contracted when I saw that outrageous world in front of me. Seeing that scenery, a single thought reverberated on the back of my mind, knocking and knocking, asking to be heard, begging to be noticed. And it was:

Why didn’t I die earlier in my life?

I instinctively held back when I felt the warm and soft grip on my hand.

The sight of a red-eyed woman cry-smiling drew my eyes from the reality in front of me, making my heart race and my sense of self crumble.

“Why… why is the world like this?” I pointed to the dozens of billboards starring both of us as the “Most gorgeous, absolutely adorable, and fate-blessed couple in the universe!”

“Isn’t that obvious? We actually are what they say: the most gorgeous, absolutely adora—”

I put my thumb on her lips while wrapping her on my arms and hugging the tightest I had in my entire life.

I don’t know why, but my feelings melted when hearing those words, it was like everything I’ve ever dreamed of had finally come true.

“He… Hey! Calm down!”

I kept quiet, sniffing her red hair, and thanking for who knows what entity governed from above.

It was true, the afterlife was enormously better, all the suffering wasn’t in vain. I was radiant, rapt, delighted. So much my existence could end at that very moment, so much I could…

“I could die.” I smiled.

And a blazing sensation pierced my heart, engulfing, once again, my soul in a deep ocean of dark, cold, and empty numbness.

This time, to my surprise, it was not a blinding glow that got me out of there, but a hand pulling me out of hundreds of feet of unbreathable water. The hands' softness and warmness reminded me of twenty seconds in the past, when a red-haired, red-eyed woman told me she loved me.

The other side of the water, the outer side, was the same woman, with a lot fewer smiles and a lot more of menacing, scarlet, murderous looks aimed at me.

“Get up.”

Her cold voice gashed my ears off, I coughed desperately trying to get that feeling out of me, trying to get the blood out of me, but, to my second surprise, I couldn’t expel anything.

“I died, I just died, my heart, my blood, my mouth, what happened? What happened to me?! What? What? What?!”

Despair, doom, and agony seasoned words sprouted up from my throat, imploring for answers to this absurd situation. The air fled from my lungs, my fingers grabbed the cloth above my heart as if trying to throw that horrible sensation away.

The red-haired girl in front of me looked unfazed as if me dying wasn’t enough for her to concern.

“Didn’t I ask you to get the fuck up?”

Her delicate hands grabbed my collar and forced me against something hard and harsh like a concrete wall. Her face, despite the homicidal look of someone who could stab my throat given a chance, was soaked on tears.

“I died… I died… I died… the girl… you… you killed me!”

I kicked her chest and fell head-first on the ground, gasping intensely while desperately searching for a way to breathe.

I felt my brain shake inside my skull, while the light escaped from my eyes.

Everything turned black after I saw something that put a smile on my lips: her concerned red eyes called for me.

The labyrinth in my ear warned me: I was lying.

The skin on my neck told me: softness existed there.

The sight of the red eyes claimed: it was her.

“Before you even think of saying anything indecent, I just—”

“You dreamed of this, huh? I can’t say I don’t like your lap pillow, though.”

We exchanged words while my head rested at her feather-soft thighs and my eyes were drawn to the black footprint on the silk whiteness of her chest. As I remembered what happened, anger and shame flourished on my heart, but, before I could flee from her loving reach, her lips pressed me down. The warm and caring wetness made all my shields vanish. A careless reaction, I must say.

Distancing her head from mine, her eyebrows jumped and her cheeks blushed when I asked.

“Before you kiss me, let me at least know your name…”

I must admit it got me timid, you can’t just kiss people you don’t know, much less if you killed them not sixty seconds before.

She chuckled in the cutest manner I’ve ever seen since the day I died. But I shushed all these feelings to think about what really mattered: what the hell was happening?

I died with a blazing sensation in my heart, even though I can’t remember what caused it. Before I could know, I felt nothing, like my disembodied soul swam… no, drowned in an ocean of nothingness. Then I appeared in a world where all billboards displayed the red-haired girl and me like we were some kind of celebrity couple beloved by the people. And… suddenly, I was killed again.

“Why did you kill me?”

“Mikhayla.”

Her voice massaged my hurt and tired ears. Being on such a wonderful girl’s lap was so invigorating that my existence could end at that very moment. So much I could…

“I could—”

“Shut the fuck up. You asked for my name and got it. Be radiant, rapt, delighted, be anything you want to be, I don’t care! Just… don’t say what you don’t truly mean.”

The last sentence sounded like a baby crying for their mother, so full of emotion and intention that the remaining word refused to come out of me.

Once again, she cried. I only felt her misery like it was mine when a tear fell from her left eye right onto my cheek, rolling all the way down to my tongue. Bitter saltness seasoned with melancholy, that was the taste that flooded my senses.

I stood up to see what the world came to be after all that. Well, it didn’t change, there were still billboards with our faces on it, and, as my racing heart and shaking legs could attest, we were currently on top of one, dozens of feet above the ground, with no safety equipment that prevented us from jumping and dying.

“You shall not fear death, for it is unreal in this dimension.”

“Why are you 200 years so suddenly?! And… what?”

“Of course, I won’t demonstrate as I’m not a masochist, but the fact that you still breathe and feel no pain with a hole like that in your chest is more than enough proof.”

Hole in my chest?

I looked down to testify the veracity of her claim. Where a huge part of my rib cage and heart were supposed to be, there was… nothing. Shocked, I stepped back, again and again, not being able to scream or complain. A cable got tangled on my ankle and I tripped. The winds of the fall slapped my skin so that I couldn’t think of the collision with the ground. I shut-squeezed my eyes and waited for it. For death.

But it did not come. The cable held me upside down and by back smashed into my giant smile on the billboard, printing an enormous stain of blood on it.

Looking up, enraged, aghast, and… happy, I saw her tearing eyes when she cut my last chance of survival, and my bones soon collided with the concrete. I had, once again, died.

The ocean, the enormous and terrifying ocean of numbness, vanished with her singing velvet-like tone and her heart-warming sun-like smile.

“Can you stop killing me for a second?!”

“It’s not my fault there’s so much dumbness in your mind.”

She sang. The loud tapping on a mute piano was the only band following her voice, it made the situation even eerier to my ears.

“Michaela, right? Why do you kill me? And why is this world so obsessed with us?”

She looked at me dead in the eye and stood from her chair.

“Have more respect, it’s Mikhayla. And it is not me who kills you, it’s a consequence from your own doing. Think about what you’ve done before that.”

That as in “dying in the most gruesome and horrible manner”?

“I don’t think you cutting the cable that stopped me from fall-dying is a consequence from my own doing.”

She buried her feet on the floor and rested her hands on the hips, confidently shouting.

“You’d end up dying anyway with your heart that consumed, I just spared you from an even slower and more painful death.”

“You killed me!”

“But you live! Can’t you see? Look at your chest, feel the blood flowing inside your veins, breathe, smell my hair if you prefer. Your death is inconsequential, you can’t die, I can’t die, there’s no way we can die in here!”

“How is there no way we can die? What is it you won’t tell me about what is happening? Explain it to me!”

“We aren’t in the real world!!”

Her scarlet hair flew with the wind as her scream pierced my eardrums with pure, heartfelt despair.

I did not, at first, understand what she said. I had so much going through my head. Namely, my deaths, the billboards, the way she acted as if we had some kind of relationship.

What did she mean? Of course, we weren’t in the real world, it was the afterlife. Even if I couldn’t understand all of its mechanisms, it was obvious that absurds could happen, like dying and not truly dying, or someone who seems to live in a different time rate that you do. But, if we really were dead, why did she look so disturbed with the “not real world” problem?

“We aren’t, we are dead, right? That’s the premise with which I acted… Is this untrue?”

She looked away, almost embarrassed, and smashed her lips between her canines. My hands grabbed her shoulders and I asked again.

“If we are not dead, what is this? Why do you act as you know me? Why is it that when I say I could die… I die?”

“They loved us”—she gently tapped my infuriated hands out of her—“Of course they did, we were spectacular, we were the most gorgeous, absolutely adorable, and fate-blessed couple in the universe. So we decided to live for them, for our admirers. We were to stream our life in this, like a reality show. No… it was never for it. It was never for them. We lived for ourselves. In this simulated world, we are given anything we want. Literally, anything. I could really use a satin handkerchief now.”

I observed as the requested item manifested in her hand. I couldn’t react as she blew her nose, nor refuse when she asked me to wipe her tearing red eyes.

“But, for two reasons, it went wrong. This world is too literal. If you say you could die with so much intent in your heart and emotion in your voice, you will. And I can only wait until they reboot you.”

“What do you mean by reboot? It’s like I’m some kind of program. You can’t use terms like that with real people… You can’t…”

“Indeed, I can’t, and that’s the second reason. When transferring your mind into this reality, you died. Your body died, at least, but your mind was already here. That’s why I’m here. I’m here because I can’t accept to lose you. I’m here because you wouldn’t handle being alone.”

To the sound of her hopeless voice, I remembered my first thought when I got here, “If I just had someone…”

“But… why? Why didn’t you let me die? I’m not worthy of being saved, I’m not someone who you should concern so much yourself with. You…”

My mind deluged with the memories I thought I’d lost. All the smiles she aimed at me, all the tears, all the kisses, everything struck me at the same time. I remembered the legions screaming with enthusiasm for us. I remembered the hundreds of gifts we received when our son was born. I remembered everything.

“Why? What d’you mean? I’m here for you. Because I love you. Crazily, madly, desperately, frantically, hysterically, I love you!”—she tapped my cheek with her finger—“And, well, if I must say…”

She smiled once more as if she was ready to give up on her existence. She grinned in so much ecstasy that she could… No. No, no, no!

“No, don’t say it, you can’t possibly say it! Mikhayla!”

She distanced herself from me and sang the words that would be forever carved into the core of my soul. She said

“I love you so much I could die.”

I couldn’t breathe as a hole appeared on her chest as if death corroded her from the very foundations of the being—the heart. My arms wrapped her falling body. My skin touched hers while I felt the heat vanish.

I would like to say that I screamed and cried in response to her ending, and maybe it was what I should have done. Maybe it was despair, doom, and agony that should have flooded my heart… not that. That’s what I should have done in the position of the other one of the most gorgeous, absolutely adorable, and fate-blessed couple in the universe.

But it was not what I did.

Her overjoyed expression transmuted into one of unending terror when she noticed what I saw on the red reflection of her eyes. She must have sunk in an ocean of dark, cold, and empty numbness when she realized what went through with my soul.

When I saw the life escape from her scarlet irises, it was not sadness that struck me. It was not a sad pout. It was not despair overwhelming my heart.

Happiness.

I was radiant, rapt, delighted, in a way I couldn’t think of dying anymore.

A beaming, death-tasting smile painted my face.

I was happy as I’ve never been in my entire life.

And thinking of why such an outrageous reaction was my response to her death, I concluded.

That was the most spectacular display of love I’ve ever received since the day I was born. To have someone die for the love they felt for me.

So even if she was to die for it.

I was happy.

“If I just had someone…”

Because, in the end, I had someone to endure it with.