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He dies.
He is dying and then he is dead, and there is nothing more to it.
And then he wakes up. He is in Tahiti. It’s a magical place.
He was dead, and now he is alive. His heart is beating, his lungs are breathing, his eyes are seeing. He is alive.
He rubs the fabric of his tie between his fingers every now and then, just to feel the linen grate on his skin. To touch something. To make sure that he’s still here.
They say he stopped breathing for eight seconds. Eight seconds. A baby is born, a couple gets married, all the while he is clutching onto the threads of life as they buck and screech and try to tear him off. Holding for eight seconds. And then he lets go.
He lets go, and he is gone. He drifts away. He is somewhere else, and then he is in Tahiti. Such a magical place.
He pretends death is a calm creature, plucking you gently from the confines of your body and bringing you to a better place. He doesn’t say that ripping the soul from its tether, severing its connection to the observable world and dragging it away as it shrieks, is an agony worse than any of them could ever imagine. He doesn’t tell them that echoes of it still haunt him at night, clawing at him as he desperately tries to forget.
Forget the way the spear had plunged through his chest. The way it hadn’t faltered. Slicing through skin and flesh and organs like he was nothing more than tissue paper. The fire that spread in its wake, screaming pain that clouded his thoughts and darkened his vision. Made his head spin and mind blur as he collapsed against the wall. It had pierced his heart, they will tell him later. It certainly felt like it.
He tries to forget the sickening squelch as the blade slid out of his chest, coated in glistening blood, but he can hear it whenever it gets too quiet. He can see the tip of the spear, stabbed through his body with pristine blood dripping onto his shirt, every time he shuts his eyes.
He can’t forget. No matter how hard he tries.
Sometimes he looks at his hands and can only see blood, fingers darting hastily to a wound they can never hope to close. They are still stained. He can see the blood crusted underneath his fingernails.
He’s wrong now. It all feels off. Like his entire existence has been shifted two inches to the right. His body still fits into the world, but he does not fit into his body.
It fluctuates. Sometimes he’s overflowing, threatening to burst from the pitiful vessel that is his suit-clad figure. Sometimes, his thoughts echo around the empty space. Cobwebs hang in the corners, gathering dust. He’s the only one there, in a massive box that he must figure out how to pilot.
Sometimes, he wants to scrape his skin off with a butter knife, to play the designer and rearrange himself until it feels right. He wants to break all of his bones and return to the drawing board. He wants to leave, return to that fleeting peace that he had felt after letting go. Return to death. Those times, there’s nothing he can do but wait it out.
He prods at the jagged scar across his heart, puffy and aching. A painful reminder that he is now, ever so slightly, off.
They say that there’s nothing wrong with him, that he’s made a miraculous recovery. He smiles at them, to hide the way he stumbles because his legs don’t feel like his own.
It hurts now, to exist.
His muscles ache when he walks too far. When he twists the wrong way. When he moves. When his mind isn’t racing with avoidance, he is wading through memories. Flashes. They sting to touch, but he can’t pry his hands away.
He rests fitfully. He snaps awake within a few hours each time, a shout on his tongue and sweat on his temples. He can never remember what he dreams, only that it terrifies him.
He can’t breathe. His lungs feel like they’re collapsing, wheezing gasps the best he can do. His hands tremble, tremors running through his body that he can do nothing but watch. His heart is a fluttering drumbeat in his chest, played by a novice who doesn’t know how to keep time. His entire body is tense, coiled tightly like a snake waiting to strike. At what, he doesn’t know.
He thinks he might still be dead. He can feel his mind retreat to the memories, the serenity. He doesn’t feel alive. He’s hanging on without a rope, drifting behind as the motions are gone through. As they pass by him without a care, without noticing. It’s fine. They have more pressing things to worry about.
They cannot bring him back from the dead, anyway.
They don’t know what it’s like. To die, to disappear, and then to wake up and suddenly be remade in a stranger’s body. To be thrust back into a world that still thinks you’re a corpse, still reeling but expected to get back to work.
They tell him that he’s different. He’s acting strange, he doesn’t seem like himself. They don’t understand. How could he not be?
He doesn’t know if he’s the same person as before. He doesn’t know who he is, he doesn’t know who he was.
He doesn’t know if he is. If he can be. Be, without contest. Without the clinging spiderwebs that he’d dredged out of the depths of death.
There’s no choice in any of this, regardless. He must deal with it, now, as it’s here. He cannot put it off, or play make-believe and pretend that everything is alright.
He died. Now he is alive. And that is how it is. That is how it must be.
He wishes it wasn’t.