The First Time I Died

DISCLAIMER: This story contains sensitive topics like suicide, mental health, romantic language, and vague nudity. Please enjoy and read with that in mind! Thank you. 

Living again is an experience I got used to a lot quicker than I would ever imagine. Opening eyelids after being permanently shut is a ride one should be delighted to take: life, again. Like removing a veil of plastic from your head, it's awakening again that is truly suffocating. It took me roughly four lives—which is hard for me to understand, but is a lot of time. I see realities, dreams, the future. But I also see death, turmoil, and naive relationships. 

My first life, my favorite, was printed by the textbook. A well-raised kid from Texas: I met a wonderful young Ava Bonde in middle school, who I engaged along the way to college. She was my rock, my stability, and my one love. We argued and disputed, but that never did get in the way of our real relationship. She loved me. Any blind person could see that. So much so that we made two miniature versions of me: Mac and Keen. Those two were the wildest duo of kids I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot. They crawled as hard as possible until they could run, then ran until their legs could no longer move. When they discovered their mouths could run, too, there was no stopping the wind-up brothers. 

I had a job as a lawyer. Made great pay and supported my home like any father should. It was exhausting, but never enough to separate me from my Ava or my kids: I got to watch them grow into fine young men, which was a blessing beyond compare. They never let me down. They grew into silk suits and leather briefcases, going for interviews and college, chasing dreams I wished to see. 

It grows fuzzy from there, but I like to remember how proud I was. Before the worst happened. How teary-eyed I managed to make myself still thinking about how they both were perfect sons. Ava cried, too. All the time. When they first put on a pair of shoes, when they walked into that school building, when they moved out, and when they brought their girlfriends home. She cried in happiness for her beautiful children, and I cried in happiness for their perfect mother.

Leaving that life felt just like what I imagined dying would be. I lay on a hospital bed and felt the coldness of the air. The aroma of hand sanitizer and gloves. I passed into a fading black, into a new one, and awoke in a bed that wasn't my own. 

My second life I ultimately wasted, but never did I hold a regret. Not a single one: not for chasing Ava once more, just to hear she died a timely death at my bedside. Nor regret for trying to find Mac or Keen in their new homes or ruining my new parents lives in the process. They were good people: a small family of three in Oregon, and I crushed their dreams of a singular family with the old ones I kept, but I felt it was necessary. I refused to let go of what I had, those children I raised. 

I found them after eight long years of saving up money without a job. The drive was emotional, and my parents in Oregon denied helping me, saying I was crazy and trying to prescribe me medicine for my mental health problems. But I found them: I knew I was alive again and that I had to reconcile with my family. Never would I give up on that.

Mac had moved into the old home, left in his will. Keen was like his mother: extremely smart in school and destined for the best in life. Mac got the fine home, as he had heart but never the academic gifts Keen or Ava had. Mac was always more similar to his father. The blinds were always open, and I cried every time I looked inside at the intricate family photos. He never took them down. His gorgeous new family sat every night in the same seats I ate dinner with him and Keen at. 

And Keen: wonderful Keen. He moved to the city, owning a profitable insurance business there called Paul Affirmative, after me. San Antonio was beautiful, too. He had managed to purchase an estate near the city, a home with a wife and three stunning children, with a gated entrance and a Cadillac baking in the sun outside. I hoped he still took care of Mac, and they both kept in touch. They were still the wind-up brothers, after all.

The sadness was overwhelming as Mac died of a heart attack. I used years of another lifetime to watch them live, see them chase stars, and rebuild what I couldn't sustain anymore. And seeing Ava's beautiful son collapse to the ground as his children crowded around him, the wife sobbing on the phone for 911, undeniably broke me for the second time since Ava herself drowned from my vision. I handwrote a note for Keen explaining everything I could and drove into the depths of San Antonio with what little money I had left. I found the scum of it, the dark alleyways with graffiti and slander chipping from the shit-stained walls. I moved the handgun from out of the back seat and shut it with the key inside. I gripped the handle, the weight of it insignificant in comparison to the load on my shoulders. I leaned against the brick, tears flooding my eyes as I leveled out the gun. Then I fired.

I wasted two more lives begging. Begging the world to see me, to understand. I thought I could be studied for science purposes or maybe give my condition to the world. I ran a New York street naked once, screaming that I would come back in another life and do it again, and I did. But that doesn't mean anyone believed it was me in a new body, or two drunk slobs who made up the whole thing.

Years flew by, and the families I never cared for and passions I began to fade from died with me. My memory was fading, the thought of my purpose, my will to live. My lives were shortening, mixes of suicide itself and trying out things you could never do with one chance. Like jumping off buildings and skydiving without a parachute.

Until now. My name is Luka Smitt; sorry for the late introduction. I live in a suite somewhere in Arizona around Sedona. It's nice, and I intended on using it for one-night stands until I met Stacy. She looked so pretty standing across from me, on the phone with the doctor. Even in her pj's, layered up like winter was closing in, she lusted in my eyes. Her tilted body and tired voice had me on a swivel, but I focused more on what the phone was saying back to her. Just looking at her gave me some sense of familiarity that even now was why I stayed with her.

Not that I didn't like her. I'd say love, if it weren't such a stretch, but I do think I'm getting there. Living over and over had been draining me inside out until I met her at that bar; ever since, I have cleaned up and have felt a spark moving once more. It's hard, at times: too hard, honestly. But I manage. Stacy moved her fingers around the phone camera, a habit she always had since I met her. It was effortlessly attractive.

"Yes, yes, I understand." She replied to the phone, her lower half limping onto the table. Didn't sound good.

I rose to my feet as she lowered the phone and turned her head towards mine. Her eyes glistened like amber, the insoles of them dilating at the reflection of me. She flared my bodily senses, even with the mourn spreading in her facial structure. 

Stacy had driven me home in a drunken state after the first time we met. I told her everything I wasn't supposed to tell her, like coming back to life and how overdose was my next target. I told her my real name is Paul and I miss my wife, but she rolled her eyes and pulled into my hotel driveway, aiding me up the stairs to my suite. The rain bustled outside, droplets ricocheting off my car onto her arms and my back, the downpour catching up just as eagerly. The metal railing on the stairs upstairs was like a waterslide, and I tried to get on it; Stacy pulled me back into the room, using my key that I probably gave her. She laid me on the bed and sat there until I fell asleep. 

"Doctor." She mumbled, her lips barely parting.

"I know. What did they say?" 

She bit her index fingernail, trying to keep eye contact but not doing a fair job. She placed her second hand into mine, which was aligned with my side and downcast. She seemed sad and doubtful. Her nose was scrunched, and my heart was beating faster than hers was, likely dying out. I frowned.

"Stage four, hon." 

And I fell. Without warning, even to myself: besides the tenderness of a swelling heart. I dropped to the floor, and only when I awoke did life continue. My head throbbed. My senses were dulling, reality around me bizarre and discombobulated. I went through the motions: Stacy continued chemo, and I followed. The cancerous tumor was removed but came back, and weeks of fighting not only the sickness but also bills I could never pay were beating me down on the floor. But I couldn't let go of Stacy, not yet. Even with a foggy headspace, my body could go on, and that was what I forced myself to do. Even sitting beside her eventual, inevitable deathbed, I was conscious only of heartache. I had to tell her before she died. The truth, every fragment of it, even the parts I could no longer bring back.

I moved the curtain, the sound of plastic rings moving along the beam oddly close. I scooted a fold-up chair next to Stacy, still beautiful as ever.

She was bald from the chemo but wearing a cap to hide that she was insecure about it. Which made no sense: she was still Stacy, just without an attribute. Her lips were still were gently swollen, her eyelashes naturally made up into a bend. Her cheekbones sunk, giving her a model's poker face. Her eyes fluttered open at my arrival, and I felt the bubble in my throat beginning to air up. 

"Stacy. I... I need to tell you everything. Crazy things you won't believe." I murmured to her, my left knee bouncing as the nerves were catching up. My heart was thrusting from my rib cage. 

"Yes, babe?" She coughed in my direction, but I didn't mind. The cancer, even if irrationally contagious, couldn't find me in the next life.

"I've done this before. Lived, I mean. It's like I'm always reincarnated. Nobody believes me." I started, the bubble threatening to pop. "I've tried for my whole two hundred and three lives to forget. It's fading away, Stacy. I'm sorry I was never fair to you: I always loved you. Just couldn't bear to admit it, with what I've seen before, done to myself before." 

The words felt like chewing leather and biting my tongue. They hurt, but that was my expectation selfishly seeping from what might be the truth. She hadn't reacted harshly yet, so I kept it moving. 

"You did everything right. I just haven't. And I am so sorry."

She had a peculiar reaction, one I hadn't gotten before. She sat upright, leaned in, cupping my face in her hands, and kissed me.

"You've been doing it wrong this whole time, love. Stop leaving me and remember. Come back to me." She sighed before sitting back down, her head sinking into the checkered foam pillow. My heart began to race.

She gripped the bed sheet, and I felt it. The crumpling fabric in my tightened hands. She squeezed her eyes at the bright light in the hospital room, and my forehead began to quiver at the brightness as my eyes closed. The sound of footsteps and chatter of doctors and bystanders as I moved again. The sound of that curtain moving, my hand filled with warmth and the breath of another at my bedside, both coming to life as my eyes still refused to open.

"Remember, Paul, remember. Dear God, please remember." 

The voice was Stacy's, but it wasn't. I kept tunneling backwards, my whole experience as a human, all those times, trying to crawl up the stem of my brain and revisit. The day I married Ava. The life I spent, the choppy story my brain tricked me into believing. It all came together.

Cold air began to settle on my skin. My mind was straining, bleeding for memory. 

I watched my sons grow old, Mac and Keen. Ava was with me. But they didn't live on: I mixed it all up into a melting pot of what I wanted to think and what I couldn't deny: Mac died of a heart attack. Just not in my second life. My first. And Keen did move to San Antonio: my insurance was Paul Affirmations, but never in another life did I use it. I used it on my and Ava's property. I didn't die. After Mac passed from cardiac arrest, I was devastated. Ava went on to the funeral, and I stayed home alone, unable to face my son. I wanted to be with him. A father should never see his child pass before him. It was unbearable, and so I did the cowardly thing to Ava and Keen, who still depended upon me.

I pulled a gun not from my backseat but from the drawer beside my bed. I paralleled it to my head, sobbing and trembling as a finger graced the trigger.

But that wasn't the first time I died, either.

My eyes opened. The light before me was warm, dusty, and brown. It reflected off of my hand that I raised to defend myself, and for once I saw the light. A tunnel, an envisioning of the time after life. One I'd never seen before. But I was wrong, yet again. The window had lowered blinds, letting light seep into my solid hospital bed, the comfort of it suddenly seeming faint. I pushed my waist deeper into the mattress. It felt clean but static, not a homey blanket. 

I heard the sound of soft crying and turned my head once away from the light and towards my Ava. She held her hands dual to her mouth, her eyes draining the saltwater from her veins, the look in her eyes overjoyed but also traumatized. She gasped for air between weeps, and I squinted my eyes.

She almost wanted to speak, I could tell. She had been, all my life. Keeping me from forgetting, from drifting away in my comatose state to nothingness. Her presence alone had kept me alive, a coma that could never stop me from awakening. The IV's pumping fluid into my body didn't fill me, but her love and the sight of her face made me cry all the liquid out, too. She placed her hand on my cheek, a smile creasing the edge of her lips. 

"I know you heard me; you never left." She whispered as I let out a gust of air from my overworked lungs. The longing in my heart wanted to scream out, to bawl, and climb into my only love's arms. My Stacy, my Ava. But instead, I answered her wishes, only two sharp words popping the bubble in my throat. 

"I remember..."