Chapter Text
"I love you both," I said as loud as I could to my wife and our daughter before I closed my eyes, hazily registering a united "we love you too" from my two favorite girls. I could feel myself slipping away and a content smile slipped onto my face. After all the fighting I had done to stay just till today, I would finally be at peace.
I heard a cacophony of screaming and a shrill, flat sound that seemed to drag on ceaselessly, amidst which, my daughter's soft "mom?" was the one I chose to focus on as I slowly started losing consciousness for forever.
My last thought was me being proud of myself about the fact that I held out long enough for Taylor Swift's tenth studio album release, and to hear all the songs on it.
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Complete darkness. That's what it has been like for months now.
When I first realized that I couldn't seem to see anything, I panicked. Attempting to scream in that panic, I realized I couldn't speak either. Thus followed the inspection of the rest of my senses and it turned out that the only activity I seemed to be able to do was breathe, and even then the air felt stuffy. It made me worried how much more time I would have to spend in such a state.
I hoped with everything inside of me, for what I think were days - I couldn't really sense time in here - that this wasn't Heaven. One would have questioned, "Why? Why didn't I want this place to be the best deal anyone could get after their inevitable demise?"
The answer to that question was that every rendition of the idea of Heaven I had ever seen or read of, depicted it as a peaceful and tranquil place, where one could relax for eternity. I clung to one in particular, the one presented by the TV show Supernatural.
A sentient destination at the end of everyone's journey, where all who had lived good lives would end up together and still have their own separate little pieces of happiness. A unique place for everyone crafted by their own memories, and yet no one would truly be alone.
That was the kind of Heaven I wanted. It was the utopia I deserved after living my life as rightfully as I had. For I knew I had been a good person. I had made mistakes here and there because who didn't, and I accepted I had been quite harsh to my parents in my last years, but it was nothing compared to how they had blatantly shunned me after I had told them how I felt.
If this place beyond life, where I could still somehow breathe, was not some limbo that I was supposed to pass through to reach Heaven, but Heaven itself, then there would have been no possible way to measure the amount of hurt I would have felt at such a betrayal.
How could one not feel betrayed by the fact that something they had always been made to believe in, to trust in, had just been a farce, a complexly woven ruse to placate the human mind?
It was just as I had begun to accept that the darkness cocooning me was possibly infinite, and that the probability of it ever letting me go was close to none, that I heard it. A steady thumping that I felt resonating around me.
At first, It made me confused and uncertain. Was this beat perhaps a warning of the arrival of a higher power? How could I sense it if I didn't have a soul, and a body to go along with it?
Wary as I was of the foreign sensation - that I would later go on to pinpoint to be my ears beginning to hear again - it brought me hope. I let myself be grounded by the pulsating all around me. All that time I had spent in the eerie silence suddenly seemed so far away, and I dreaded the possibility of going back to that nothingness.
Fortunately, that did not happen. There were times when the steady thumping I had grown accustomed to went off beat, a little too fast or a little too slow, but the fact was there that it always remained. A wordless lullaby of reassurance.
Not long after that, the sounds I heard began to increase. Different patterns, pitches and tones, though I still could not hear anything that sounded the least bit intelligible. It was at this point that I began to feel even more suffocated than I had in the beginning, along with starting to feel physically confined as well.
Time didn't stop passing me by just as I didn't stop wondering where in the hell I was, until the day I finally heard someone say something that I could actually understand. The person sounded like they were under water, or maybe I was, yet I could not pass off their words as anything other than what they really were.
"Hey, babies"
I didn't know it then, but that phrase above, it was just the first of the many that were going to come after it, and all of which were going to hint very heavily toward one thing. An idea, that I can now tell you all with a hundred and one percent certainty, is a fact.
I, Diane Jodie Allan-Becker, was being reborn.