I felt a warm fluid trickling down the side of my forehead. I heard voices above me but I was too tired to even turn around to look. I felt my eyelids growing heavier by the minute. I gently closed them and fell into a sea of darkness.
Was I dead? I wondered. I stood alone in the darkness that envelope me. Where was the slideshow to life people claimed they saw before death took them? Why do I see nothing? From a distance, I saw an image coming closer. I quickly grabbed onto it before it could fade away.
A little girl was clutching on tightly to a woman’s hand. They were walking around the park. The woman lifted the little girl onto the swings. I felt an emotions seeping through the image. A warm glow surrounded the little girl. What was this emotion I had locked on to?
Realization hit me like a ten ton truck. Happiness. A feeling I had not felt in a very long time. I tried to hold on to the image for as long as I could before it faded away and I was left in the darkness again. I waited patiently this time around. It wasn’t too long before a second image appeared.
The little girl was now grown up. She had pigtails in her hair and was carrying a pretty little bag with her school books in it. It was her first day of school. As she saw the school bus approaching, she quickly ran towards it. She heard her mum calling out her name but she didn’t turn back. When she finally turned around, she saw her mum lying in a big puddle of blood.
I reached down and gently stroke the woman’s hair. The little girl was no longer in a rush to get to school. She was now kneeling beside her mum crying. The woman now lay like a statue, in her hand; she was still holding the packet of sandwich she made that morning.
I felt tears flowing down my cheek. I let the image slip away. I wandered around in the darkness for quite some time before the next image came by. This time, I saw a teenage girl dressed in a baby blue dress with a tiara on her head. Tears were tumbling down her cheeks. As I moved closer, I saw a bruise on her arm. She took down the tiara and broke it into pieces, throwing it into the middle of the road. Before she faded away, I heard her mutter, “I’m not a princess, this isn’t a fairytale.”
My heart went out to her. I wanted to comfort her but she was already gone. I stood silently in the darkness around me. I heard a strange beeping noise. I blocked it out as I caught on to my next image.
The girl was now dressed in her graduation robe. She was on stage receiving her graduation certificate. She glanced down into the crowd. Her gaze fell on the empty seat. Tears began to well up in her pretty blue eyes. She quickly swiped them away and plastered a smile on her face. When the ceremony was over, while everyone grabbed pictures with their family, she sat beside the pond feeling so alone.
Another image quickly took over the image. This time, the girl was in a club dancing her night away. From where I stood, I saw someone offering her something. I wanted to warn her but it was already too late. The images shuffled forward as I saw her getting washed out day after day.
The beeping noise appeared again. It was no longer a steady beep but an irregular one. I heard someone calling out to me. He was telling me to stay strong. It was him. I blocked out his pleads as I drifted off back into the darkness.
The girl I had been looking at was me. There really was a slideshow to life. His voice sounded so familiar but I couldn’t place the name to it. Then it all came flooding back to me. It was him. He was there for her all along. He sat there with her all night on the pavement the night her dad hit her, he’d comforted her that day beside the pond after graduation, he had helped her pull through it all. I had managed to block him out of every image. He helped me through it all and I pushed him away.
I could hear him now. He was begging the doctors to do something. He asked me to stay strong and wake up. I was tired, I wanted to sleep. Then, something made me stop. He muttered those three words. Something I hadn’t heard in a very long time. I slowly opened my eyes.
It was a narrow escape from death.