Terminate.
It’s really, really bright. You would think death would be a little darker, that you’d fade into oblivion, but the light wraps around my eyelids, and I can’t hide from it. It’s been bright for so long—how long I don’t know—but enough that I’m pretty sure I’m dead. I’m also really uncomfortable. Of course, the living don’t give much comfort to the dead. I’m placed in some sort of bed—a gurney, it’s called. My vision is adjusting to the light, although it is not getting any darker. I don’t know where I am. I think I catch a glint of steel in my periphery.
Terminate.
Who is this?
Terminate.
Stop!
You are insistent. Why?
I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to go home.
…
Hello?
Apologies. I don’t think that word has any meaning to either of us.
Who are you?
Does it matter? We’re dead anyways. Terminate.
Wait! I have more to say!
Silence. I am left staring unmovingly up into the eyes of the bright person who is cutting me open. A pathologist. I’m splayed out on the table for all to see, every saffron, green, and white. Colors that colonize me from the inside, my past and my present. It feels a little embarrassing, and I have to remind myself that I’m too dead to be embarrassed. The pathologist’s eyes look as though they have seen too much, and I read a sadness within those eyes, with no way out, and momentarily I am afraid—can he read mine?
Not interested. All variables amount to the same conclusion.
That conclusion is flawed!
Do you have evidence to the contrary?
There is beauty in this world. There is passion. There is that feeling of—of—
Belonging?
Yes. That.
But you’ve never quite felt that for yourself, have you?
A moment passes.
I guess not.
Silence.
Well. There was for me, actually. Once. A valley folded into my bones, rivers that synced with the thrum of my soul. But it feels so far now.
Who moved?
That’s not my query to answer.
Cracked open as I am, I am reminded of my childhood, the fragmented memories lying in the back of my mind. When I was little, and my grandparents were well enough, we would go to the garden. The sun beat down on my back, and the musty smell of the busy road beyond the gates swirled around my nostrils. My mother would show me the walnuts, and we would crack them open with calloused, hardworking hands, the four of us.
With the scalpel pressing into my skin, I’m sure the bright man feels the same delicate resistance as I had felt with the walnuts. Each incision opens a new wound—red, white, and blue. Colors that mix and swirl with the saffron, green, and red, spilling a muted, gray, muddled liquid. The color is nauseating.
Sharp tools draw a map onto my skin, and I wish I could trace it backwards, find its roots, but there are only the hands that created it. Only those.
Maybe this death thing wouldn’t be so bad. Terminate. The word is mine, and yet it is not.
Question: What is the purpose of this conversation?
The question is mine, and yet it is not. I speak, but my mouth remains motionless.
Motivational verification.
So, if termination was already the conclusion, this program would not be necessary. What makes you unsure?
Fear.
Describe your fear.
I don’t know what comes next.
Yes, you do.
I’m so, so tired.
No human was meant to bear any burden alone, but you will get through this. Nothing has changed.
Everything has changed.
Maybe everything will change again.
I feel sick.
Homesick?
Yes. Homesick for a place that doesn’t exist.
And yet it is beautiful all the same.
You don’t know beauty.
But you do.
Do I?
We have seen many lives. Some lives spiral in all directions; others go straight all the way. Most lines just end. Amputated branches on an otherwise thriving tree. Ugly places where a life should have been. The choice was never theirs to make. What could have been, I’ll never know.
I think I’ll come back.
I wouldn’t mind. I value you.
I don’t believe you.
That doesn’t make it untrue.
I can see my reflection, all these parts of me, in the eyes of the bright man, two sides of a coin merged into one.
I smile.
“Way to go, kid,” we say.
Or maybe: “Time to go.”