Fading

The only thing he saw was nothing. His eyes reached out into the abyss but found only darkness. His vision clawed at the thick swath of aether that seemed to somehow race toward him and yet fall away at the same time. Still the void persisted.

He had no tangible body, no grounding, no grasp of what or where he was. Descartes' iconic slogan rattling around his brain provided the only morsel of solace in this perplexing plane. 'Im thinking, therefore I exist...at least in some regard.'

A trickle of memories appeared:

A car accident.

A hospital bed.

A hazy blur of faces.

Perhaps this was the afterlife. But was it Heaven, Hell or Purgatory? Perhaps it was another dimension unbeknownst to humans. As he turned the question over, a minuscule white speck appeared in the distance. 'Light, what a relief,' he thought. The speck became a beam, no bigger than a pinhead, as it pierced through the pitch black. Perhaps this was the portal to salvation...

He squinted furiously, trying to make sense of this chaotic mindscape. The beam began to expand and seemed to engulf him, even though there was no him to engulf. As the light washed over his formless form, a tidal wave of memories smacked into his consciousness. Tidbits of his life whizzed past with terrifying speed. It all happened so fast that he could barely comprehend the insanity currently transpiring. He'd heard the phrase "life flashing before your eyes" before but had always imagined a pleasant slide show of memories. But this was a beast of a different breed. Every emotion he'd ever experienced had been condensed into a large cumbersome pill that he was supposed to dry swallow. It happened with such voracious speed that he wasn't sure if was actually real. 'Maybe I'm in a coma and will wake up soon to find that this was just a dream or a figment of my imagination.'

Just as he began to fondle the idea, a face a appeared before him. It had no skin, no bone and no flesh. It was hardly more than an outline carved into the dark. It's features carried a kind of masculinity; a prominent forehead, defined cheekbones, strong lips. It stared back at him for what seemed like an eternity before uttering two words: "let go."

At that moment, he felt himself begin to melt. He had no substance but his energy began to disband. He knew that this was the end to one life and the beginning of another. His thoughts, now reduced to smoldering embers, began to extinguish. The fear and concern were whisked away like dandelions seeds in the wind. Somehow everything made sense. Somehow everything was in its right place. As the last remnants of his existence disintegrated into the Cosmos, he felt one final message enter his consciousness:

"I don't know what else I expected."