Death

At first your vision becomes distorted: Points of light sprinkle themselves onto every visible surface. Clouds of color flourish across your retina. Some visual details began to blur out while others exaggerate. Errors randomly emerge in your perception of motion. Faces of others nearby warp and fade until you cannot recognize them. Bizarre artifacts overlap throughout your vision until your surroundings are indistinguishable.

Meanwhile, a loud ringing in your ear tries to drown out the mixed voices of those around you. Your understanding of perfectly audible English deteriorates until it sounds like gibberish. Whirring and swooshing noises swell. Your ears feel plugged and a tight ache encompasses your scalp.

You feel like you are floating; a suspended, bodiless point in space. You seem to sink into the floor while rising up through the ceiling; your head and feet feel as though they are intersecting with the walls. You can no longer distinguish yourself as separate from the room.

Your condition worsens. All your senses merge into one stream of random nonsensical signals. Incoherent thoughts populate your consciousness: You taste an orange. For a brief moment you are intrigued by the thought of holding an orange in your hand. Immediately after you feel an immense familiarity with the exact moment, and you are flooded with a dream like emotion; the illusion that you remember doing this when you were a young child. The structure of logic falls apart and simple concepts like the passing of time, or up and down, no longer make sense to you. Your awareness downs in a torrential river of random, garbled stimuli.

By now a few minutes have passed since the onset of these strange symptoms. Regions of your brain are incrementally attacked by a plague, destroying information that make you who you are: Your memories of the past and the people you grew up with. Your beliefs and your dreams you hoped to achieve in your lifetime.

The treasured memory of coming home to your mom and dad from your first day of school is erased. The warmth you felt when you hugged them, ate home-made cookies, and told your them about your experiences that day; erased. The sleep over at your first friend's house when you were 7; erased. The camping trip you had when you were 11; erased. First day of work; erased. The skills and talents you spent years refining are erased. A wealth of knowledge and experiences are erased. All your emotions, dreams and passions are erased. Your desire to keep living is erased.

You are erased - gone forever.

And you will never be able to see any of the people you love, ever again.

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I cannot expect anyone to find solace or closure in this part of life. I'd prefer that it simply be seen as something that sucks, and that there is no comforting way to look at it. Human beings, as well as all other forms of sentient life, are beautiful precious parts of the universe that deserve better. The only comfort I can find in it is in knowing that I tried my best to change it, rather than having formed some stupid way of looking at it to convince myself it was acceptable. (To be continued.)